Response to questions posed

Mallika Bose (mub13@psu.edu)

Motivation

The motivation behind my work has been very simple: to get an understanding of the food system of low-income families in Pennsylvania.  The plan is to use this understanding as a springboard for future work related to food system planning. As part of this project I have worked with public housing communities in Harrisburg and Lewistown, and more recently two neighborhoods in West Philadelphia.

 

Expectations

I plan to work in this area for an extended period of time.  I hope to understand the complexities of the system and figure out ways of engaging with the actors involved at different locations (being an architect/planner, my worldview is place based, and hence my unit of analysis is at the neighborhood scale) with the intention of being a (positive) change agent.

 

Modes of engagement

My work has engaged with community members though I typically do not characterize it as public scholarship, since I only work with a small group of students.  One of my prime motivations for participating in this seminar is to see how others are engaging in work related with the food system through a public scholarship framework.  I have engaged with community members through focus groups and telephone interviews. I have also learned about the food environment of the communities that I am working in by conducting surveys of restaurants/grocery stores/convenience stores at the neighborhood scale.

 

Unforeseen implications

Personally, one ramification of my project is finding out the complexities of the food system in this country, and the structural inequalities of the social/political/economic system in which we are all implicated. Grappling with the complexity of the issues is sometimes a roadblock to my personal agency. It is daunting to figure out how to tackle the problem without being overwhelmed by the issues.