Ph.D graduate Anelyse Weiler co-authored an article, entitled, "Forging links between food chain labour activists and academics", in The Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems and Community Development. In the article, the authors describe a series of efforts that aim to highlight the experiences and potentials for community-university partnerships in order to have a stronger role in addressing issues of labour across systems.
Anelyse Weiler is a Ph.D. graduate of sociology at the University of Toronto. She successfully defended her dissertation, entitled The Periphery in the Core: Investigating Migration, Agrarian Citizenship and Metabolic Rift Through a Case Study of the Apple. She is currently a College Professor of Sociology at Okanagan College in British Columbia.
I have posted the citation and abstract below. The full text can be found here.
Levkoe, C. Z., McClintock, N., Minkoff-Zern, L.-A., Coplen, A. K., Gaddis, J., Lo, J., Tendick-Matesanz, F., & Weiler, A. M. (2016). Forging links between food chain labor activists and academics. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development. Advance online publication.
Interest in food movements has been growing dramatically, but until recently there has been limited engagement with the challenges facing workers across the food system. Of the studies that do exist, there is little focus on the processes and relationships that lead to solutions. This article explores ways that community-engaged teaching and research partnerships can help to build meaningful justice with food workers. The text builds on a special roundtable session held at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Chicago in April 2015, which involved a range of academic scholars and community-based activists. We present these insights through a discussion of key perspectives on collaborative research and teaching and learning as food-labor scholar-activists. We argue that despite significant gaps in the way that food movements are addressing labor issues, community-campus collaborations present an opportunity for building alliances to foster food justice. Building on our collective analysis and reflection, we point to five recommendations for fostering collaboration: connecting to personal experience; building trust; developing common strategies; building on previous community efforts; and, appreciating power differences and reciprocating accordingly. We conclude with some final thoughts on future research directions.