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Marc Edelman is professor of anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His scholarly and advocacy work is at the intersection of agrarian issues, social movements and human rights. In 2014–15 he was part of the group that advised the Geneva UN Mission of the Plurinational State of Bolivia on the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas, which the UN General Assembly adopted in 2018. He also participated in the creation, in 2018, of an international research and action network on authoritarian populism called the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative.
Edelman’s recent books include Global Land Grabbing and Political Reactions ‘From Below’ (Routledge, 2018, co-edited with Ruth Hall, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Ian Scoones, Ben White, and Wendy Wolford), Estudios agrarios críticos: Tierras, semillas, soberanía alimentaria y los derechos de las y los campesinos (Quito: Editorial del Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales, 2016), Activistas empedernidos e intelectuales comprometidos: Ensayos sobre movimientos sociales, derechos humanos y estudios latinoamericanos (Quito: Editorial del Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales, 2017), and Political Dynamics of Transnational Agrarian Movements (Fernwood, 2016, co-author Saturnino M. Borras, Jr.), which has also appeared in Spanish and Japanese, with versions pending in Portuguese, French, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Bahasa Indonesia, Burmese and Thai.
Among his recent articles is “How Capitalism Underdeveloped Rural America” in Jacobin magazine.
Melissa Fuster, assistant professor in the Department of Health and Nutrition Sciences, is a food policy and public health nutrition scholar interested in the sociopolitical factors shaping eating practices. Her current research examines the role of policy and food environments on food practices and health outcomes, with a focus on ethnic restaurants. She earned a Ph.D. at Tufts University.
Margrethe Horlyck-Romanovsky, DrPH, assistant professor, Department of Health and Nutrition Sciences, Brooklyn College, is a public health professional, researcher and educator with a focus on the intersections of migration, urban environments, food, and health. Dedicated to examining and addressing the dynamics of health disparities, diet and phenotypic risk profiles among populations of African descent, her interdisciplinary research portfolio includes obesity and diabetes diagnosis/epidemiology, diabetes risk prediction and health behavior/nutrition assessment. She holds a B.S. in nutrition from Ankerhus Seminarium, Denmark; a B.A. in French language and literature and a master of public health nutrition from Hunter College; and a DrPH from the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy. She also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institutes of Health.
Sarah K. Khan writes and creates content (prints, photography, films) about food, culture, women, and migrants. Her research has taken her to live with Bedouins in the Middle East, document the plight of Indian women farmers, traverse the world of Queens, New York, and film women cooks and farmers about their foods and ways in Fez, Morocco. Khan has degrees in Middle Eastern history (B.A.), public health and nutrition (M.P.H., M.S.), and traditional ecological knowledge systems/plant sciences (Ph.D.). A two-time Fulbright scholar, Khan is the recipient of multiple grants and fellowships. She continues her multimedia projects on U.S. and South Asian women farmers (with a brown supershero narrator), Migrant Kitchens, The Cookbook of Gestures, and the Book of Delights.
Tammy L. Lewis is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and professor at the CUNY Graduate Center in sociology and earth and environmental sciences. Her research examines sustainability and alternatives to development, with a focus on Latin America. Her recent books include Ecuador’s Environmental Revolutions: Ecoimperialists, Ecodependents, and Ecoresisters (MIT Press, 2016), Green Gentrification: Urban Sustainability and the Struggle for Environmental Justice (Routledge, 2017, co-authored with K. Gould), and Twenty Lessons in Environmental Sociology, 3rd edition (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2020, with K. Gould). Her work has appeared in Conservation Biology, Environmental Sociology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Social Science Quarterly, Teaching Sociology, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. She chaired the American Sociological Association’s Environmental Sociology section.
Christopher Loperena is an assistant professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research examines indigenous and black territorial struggles and the sociospatial politics of economic development in Honduras. He has served as an expert witness at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and in support of asylum claimants from Honduras.
Nekole Parton Alligood is a cultural anthropologist and member of the Delaware Nation of Oklahoma. Alligood has worked with Native American museum collections and also in cultural resource management. She served her tribe as its NAGPRA officer (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) as well as director of cultural preservation (2014–20), completing three repatriations, two of which were in partnership with the Delaware Tribe of Indians and the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. She also provided tribal assistance on a repatriation in conjunction with the Forest Service concerning looted human remains in West Virginia. Alligood holds a B.A. and M.A. in cultural anthropology from the University of Oklahoma and a B.A. in English from the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma. She lives outside of Anadarko, Oklahoma, on her great grandmother’s original 1902 allotment along the Washita River. Alligood owns River Rat Consulting, LLC and works as a consultant.
Pieranna Pieroni believes in the transformative power of education–for teachers, learners and communities. For 30 years, she has taught, mentored, collaborated with, and learned from young people from diverse backgrounds in formal and informal settings. Pieroni is director of College Now, a college transition program for New York City public high school students, at Brooklyn College, where she has also taught composition, literature, and a critical-transdisciplinary garden-based environmental studies course. She holds a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature and a master’s in English from Brooklyn College. She earned an M.Phil. in urban education from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is a doctoral candidate. She is a native New Yorker who lives, works, organizes, gardens in the community, and sings with the Brooklyn Women’s Chorus.
Tiana is a recent Brooklyn College graduate with a Bachelor of Science in food and nutrition studies. Her interests in food sustainability and how food politics and culture affect one’s access to preventative health care grew during her academic studies. She wanted to find find a way to use her knowledge of food and nutrition to directly benefit her community of East New York. Tiana previously worked with City Harvest and Harvest Homes Farmers’ Market teaching nutrition education while performing cooking demonstrations. During the school year, she works with College Now at Brooklyn College as a nutrition tutor. As market manager, she combines her devotion to food justice in her community with her extensive knowledge in nutrition sciences to encourage food security in East New York.
George Stonefish is a lifelong resident of New York City, and well-known as a native singer, dancer, artist and speaker. He is a First Nation member [American Indian] who is 1/2 Delaware; 1/4 Ottawa; 1/8 Ojibwa; 1/16 Pottawatomi; 1/16 Miami from Ontario, Canada. However, he was raised in New York City and has spent most of his life working for the First Nation [American Indian] community on both a national and local level. He started his activism at an early age when he went to the takeover of Alcatraz by First Nation students in 1969 with his Grandmother and Uncle. Since that time he has participated in the defense of Native Nations as a member of their warrior societies and by promoting their struggles though media, as he had the first weekly radio program on Native issues on WBAI 99.5 FM in New York from 1978 to 1983. He was also raised in the tradition of his people, which has helped him to organize Native Nations’ governmental structures in preparation for federal recognition. He has spoken at the United Nations and at universities across the USA. Stonefish has worked for the American Indian Community House throughout his life in various capacities, and now sits on the board of directors.
Barbara Tagliaferro is an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Health and Nutrition Sciences at Brooklyn College, and a research coordinator at the Department of Population Health, New York University Grossman School of Medicine. This semester she is teaching the undergraduate courses Foods of Diverse Populations, and the graduate course Cultural Aspects of Food; she recently taught the graduate course Conducting Community Needs and Strengths Assessments. Tagliaferro holds a B.A. in cultural anthropology from Universidad of Buenos Aires, an M.A. in social studies of science and technology from Universidad de Quilmes, an M.P.H. from CUNY School of Public Health, and she’s currently a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at the Universidad de Buenos Aires.
