Erica Zurawski is a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of California Santa Cruz. She is a Graduate Fellow in UCSC’s Science & Justice Research Center. She also holds a Juris Doctorate from the Law School of the University of Wisconsin. In this April 2019 interview with Alanna K. Higgins, she talks about her research on food justice, her website, and a source of inspiration she shares with Donna Haraway.

You presented a talk entitled “From Gold Rush to Reefer Madness: Linking Colonialism, Commodity Flows, and Gentrification Within Denver’s Food Justice Organizing.” Could you tell us about this work, and how it relates to your PhD?

I would love to! That was the presentation I gave at the Graduate Association for Food Studies Conference at UNC Chapel Hill, which is intimately related to the archival research I conducted the summer prior in 2018. Broadly, my research is informed by the two years I spent working in Denver for a local food justice non-profit. I situate my research in the two neighborhoods the non-profit serves. As a result of my experiences and observations, I spent about three weeks in the Denver Public Library’s Western History & Genealogy Department, where I researched these two neighborhoods. With the help of the incredible historians and genealogists at the DPL, I looked through autobiographies, government planning documents, news clippings, and other ephemera on these two neighborhoods and neighborhood residents to get a sense of how these spaces came to be so differentiated and separated from the rest of Denver. I found much more than I had anticipated and this research continues to occupy a central part of my dissertation research. Most profoundly, it manifests in how I engage in a deep historical analysis to articulate how food insecurity and injustice in these neighborhoods is part and parcel of the layered and interwoven oppressions that created and continue to delineate the neighborhoods.

In a way, my presentation at the GAFS Conference was my processing all that I encountered in the archives and an attempt to piece together a history of the neighborhoods through what could be found in the archives but also through what was missing, unable to be spoken, or haunting in its absence in the archives. Using the Colorado Gold Rush as a starting point in the settlement of these neighborhoods, my research and this presentation shows how the logics and projects of colonialism persist even through the marijuana boom in Denver. This historical interrogation of the creation of space is central to my dissertation research, as I look to weave together a deep history of place and rich ethnographic narratives of how people move through, resist, survive, and imagine the places they occupy. My work looks to illuminate how multiple colonial projects – environmental degradation, food insecurity, gentrification and urban sprawl, industrialization, to name a few – converge in and uniquely manifest through food injustices in these neighborhoods.

How did you get interested in issues of food justice and colonization?

The simple answer to this question is, avocados. The long answer is much less direct. I first became interested in food justice in law school when I was taking an international trade law class and an international environmental law class. More on that later, though. After law school I took time off to explore those interests, and I spent two years working for a food justice non-profit in Denver. My experience here was life-changing to say the least. Like many foodies and food studies folks I know, my approach to food issues stemmed from a very Michael Pollan-esque understanding. My time working in food justice organizing quickly changed and complicated this understanding. Through the various positions I occupied at this non-profit – from market attendee to administrative assistant, to implementing the new Double Up Food Bucks SNAP program -it was all just so much more complicated, sticky, and fraught. True to form, I began questioning everything. My own preconceived notions of what food access is and who food justice is for, what the “right” route to building alternatives to our global agrifood industry could be, and perhaps most profound to my experience in a non-profit, what my role as an educated, white female, unpaid food justice intern was in a predominately non-white community.

In this moment, I was grappling with applying to graduate schools and finding my voice in what would become my research. And then I found Julie Guthman’s work. I could be a bit biased, given that she is now my advisor, but finding her work in that moment was like opening the Pandora’s box of critical food studies. Since then, I began my Ph.D. at the UC Santa Cruz in a community of scholars that has dedicated so much time to critical food and agricultural studies. It has been a swift learning and growing process changing over from an objective and positivist legal training to a program built on interdisciplinarity and innovation, but it is this change that introduced me to scholarship on the legacies of colonialism. As I know you understand, calls for decolonization – an academia, alternative food organizing, and beyond – are burgeoning and becoming more urgent. I see my research, activism, teaching, and mentorship as responding to that call.

What are some of your other research interests?

As a second year Ph.D. student, I still very much feel like I have so many theoretical threads to explore and follow. It is simultaneously inspiring and overwhelming, as I am sure many can relate to. I am currently wrangling together urban sociology and geography, critical food studies, and environmental studies through my research, so those fields broadly represent my interests. Like any other academic and green Ph.D. student, I have other ideas and projects that I daydream about. I love the power of narrative and storytelling, so I think a lot about how to use narrative to tell stories about food insecurity and food injustices – specifically through narratives on hunger. I draw a lot of inspiration from Psyche Williams-Forson and Avery Gordon in this sense, thinking about how hunger – the creation, manipulation, experience, survival through hunger – ripple into the fabric of how we differently experience, relate to, and think of food and how narratives and stories show this more intimately than any other portrayal.

I think what has been even more interesting to me lately are ethnographic methodologies and approaches to storytelling, and the risks and problematic histories inherent in ethnographic research and representation. I have had the privilege of thinking through these questions along with many of my colleagues at UC Santa Cruz through multiple ethnographic seminars, and the questions and provocations still remain: what is good, reflexive, ethical ethnographic research? I think the perennial question, at least amongst many of us here at UC Santa Cruz, is how do we navigate being both a scholar and an activist? How does that manifest in our research and in our writing? Who are we researching and writing for or with? How do we demand rigor, reflexivity, and accountability both in our own research and in our disciplines? I truly have my colleagues and advisors at UC Santa Cruz to thank for so many of these provocative questions and conversations, it has been a uniquely rewarding experience to be present with and supported in such an incredible community.

You have a law degree from the University of Wisconsin. What made you want to get a PhD on top of that? Do you bring any of that training into your work?

I get this question a lot, and it always makes me laugh a little to myself being that I never imagined getting a Ph.D. while in law school, or even after for that matter! It was never a calculated or anticipated path but looking back it all feels very serendipitous. In law school, I was interested in international trade and environmental law, but I never quite felt like the questions I was asking could be answered from a legal perspective. I always think back to a particular question I asked my International Trade Law professor: “Why in the world do ship avocados from so far away without any qualms about the environmental impacts?” His response was always “Well, that is an interesting question,” and for me this response shows the limits of what a legal training could provide. In retrospect, I think I just asked too many questions that went beyond the scope of a purely legal, objective analysis. In this way, a Ph.D. is far more accommodating to my way of thinking and perceiving.
Even though a legal education alone wasn’t quite the path for me, the training certainly has given me a lot. First and foremost, I am fluent in two very diverse disciplines. As a scholar of food justice, an understanding of what “justice” actual means and consists of in the United States is a powerful tool in understanding the limits of what justice is and can be. Having an understanding of the “canon” of the American legal system is useful in any attempt to critique it, and in this way, I find my legal education to be especially illuminating. I will say, I find it absolutely fascinating to think that in all of my time at the University of Wisconsin Law School, we never once read or learned about scholars like Kimberle Crenshaw or Patricia Williams, two legal scholars that both spent time at the University of Wisconsin Law School. It really gives credence to the feeling I had while in law school, that something was missing to all of the legal theory we were encountering, and it shows just how much interdisciplinary work has yet to be done. Perhaps work that my legal training and Ph.D. can contribute to.

At the same time, I have so many of my professors at the University of Wisconsin to Law School to thank for this new path that I am on. My research and writing skills are as robust as there are predominately because of my legal research and writing professor, Deborah Moritz. She also unconditionally supported me through law school and on my path to pursuing a Ph.D. My international law professor Erik Ibele and international environmental law professor Sumudu Attupatu also encouraged my question-asking and my ideas around global trade, food, and environmental justice. So, while practicing law was never in the books for me, I don’t think I could have ever found this new path without their support or encouragement and without law school.

What is it like being a Graduate Fellow at the UC Santa Cruz Science & Justice Research Center?

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As part of the training program, we are asked to put on an event that experiments in collaborative and interdisciplinary conversations. With a lot of room to explore our own interests, myself and another Fellow and ASFS member, Halie Kampman, are hosting an event featuring roundtable conversations with food studies scholars, focusing on the conversational threads around the futures of critical food studies. With the support of the SJRC, we have been able to curate an event where we are bringing so many powerful food studies scholars together in one room. We just received an ASFS Local Event Grant in support of this event as well, and frankly can’t wait to experience the ideas generated by these conversations. You can learn more about our event, “The Futures of Critical Food Studies” on our website here.

While the opportunity to plan this event is incredible, I think the most profound part of being a Fellow with the SJRC is the opportunity to be in dialogue with and learn from so many brilliant scholars. The SJRC focuses on co-laborative practices and trans- and inter-disciplinary experimentation in a way that builds on UC Santa Cruz’s historic commitments to justice and research, and it shows through the events the SJRC hosts, the support to graduate students, and the spirit of critically engaged conversations. For me, the Works-in-Progress dialogues with faculty are deeply inspiring as an opportunity to see and engage with faculty research projects. Through events such as these along with other SJRC programming, the SJRC really rouses deeper, slower, and creative conversations and alliances.

You have an incredibly beautiful website. Do you think it’s important for researchers to have these sorts of public forums?

Oh goodness, thank you – and what a great question! My approach to the research that I do looks to make the knowledge I produce and the conversations I engage with publicly visible. This is an ethic that is important to me as a researcher and an activist. I draw a lot of inspiration from scholars that see their research as an opportunity to engage with the communities they work with and offer their work to the public in ways that visibilize research processes and makes accessible previously exclusive academic spaces.

If I am being honest though, there is a bit of self-promotion that motivates my online presence. This is more of a response to the nature of academia than anything else. If I am being even more honest, as an emerging scholar, my website tends to be a means to network and self-promote, as it is mainly those in academia (and my parents, hah) that visit it. At the same time, I have plans to utilize my website as a space to make public my research process, the experiences I have, and the ideas I have on various topics…but, perhaps after my qualifying exams.

I also think it is worth noting that while social media, websites, and public engagement is important for the work that I do, there is also a steep learning curve and a large time component that this type of presence demands. In that sense and like any other social media promotion, these skills and access to the resources to produce content like this is rife with privilege which excludes and prevents other voices from engaging in similar promotion. For that reason, I hesitate to unabashedly proclaim the importance of these public forums and self-promotion. At the same time, there are really great resources to get started with this kind of engagement and promotion. Emily Contois’ website and the resources she shares, for one, helped me and many others get started with my own site and social media presence.

While designing a website and putting time into social media can be daunting while navigating the early stages of a Ph.D., I think there is a lot to be said for the food studies community. I can’t tell you how many times I have had the opportunity to meet food studies scholars in person because of my online presence, or how many times I’ve had the “We follow each other on Twitter!” moment, and I attribute so much of that to the supportive food studies community.

According to your website, you’re a certified vinyasa yoga teacher. Has this training been helpful in any way to your graduate studies?

I am! I taught yoga for five years before starting my Ph.D. last year and I have to say I miss it dearly. My training and experience teaching yoga has given me so much more than I could possibly articulate. For one, it has given me the tools to endure the intensity of graduate school. I actually began practicing as a way to cope with the stresses of law school, it gave me an out to move through, process, and get out of my head. Of anything, my training gave me the knowledge to work through the anxieties, stresses, and demands of graduate school.

My adventure to wanting to train actually began, in retrospect, quite a hilarious way, and I can already imagine my partner eye-rolling at the thought of me telling this story publicly. I began my training in 2012, thinking I would move to Thailand and teach after graduating law school, all of which may have been inspired by a English scuba-diving instructor (named Zac Morris for you Saved by the Bell fans) I had met on an island in Thailand while interning at a law firm in Thailand. Alas, when reality hit that running away to a proverbial Neverland wasn’t quite an option, I devoted myself to learning how to teach yoga as a way to give others the gifts that yoga had given me. To teach from this place was deeply rewarding.

Fast-forward, and my yoga training and experience teaching has translated in an unexpected way. One of the biggest and hardest lessons I learned while teaching yoga, was that not everybody will like you or your teaching. As a result, I learned quickly how to read a room and read body language. Now, I’d like to think I can instantly spot the person in the room who will be doubting my capabilities or teaching, a tool that has come in handy in giving presentations and in teaching. In the same way, teaching yoga gave me an opportunity to practice teaching. Having the undivided attention of nearly 100, sweaty yoga students, watching your every move and demonstration undeniably gave me the confidence I have now to teach.

And finally – you’ve also recently become an avid birder! What’s your favorite bird you’ve seen so far?

Hah! Indeed, I have, although most of my “birding” happens from my apartment nestled close to the Redwoods. Santa Cruz is quite the place to be with nature, as it is so entangled with the everyday at UC Santa Cruz, and as someone from Wisconsin it is captivating. No wonder Donna Haraway wrote as she did while here.

It is certainly difficult to pick a single bird of everything I have seen, because holy smokes, seemingly every week is a new moment! The Anna’s Hummingbirds keep me entertained as they fight for the feeder outside of my office window, the heart-faced Barn Owl that rested outside my bedroom window in the wee-hours of one morning was so profound, the gaggle of California Quail chicks that scurried about outside our front door were impossibly precious (and speedy!), the Red Tailed Hawk that sadly took the California Quail matriarch even after I chased it away with a hose was nonetheless awe-inspiring. At this point, I am not sure if I chose to pick up birding or if the birds in Santa Cruz chose me! I think of them all, however, I would have to choose the White-Tailed Kite. They are the only raptor that can hover in a single spot, beating its wings effortlessly, while scoping out prey. To see it happen feels as if they are almost angelic, in a way. As I answer this question, I realize just how nerdy I sound. Alas, no shame here!