Sarah Wald
Assistant Professor of English and Environmental Studies and Sustainability
English and Environmental Studies and Sustainability
Drew University

In my scholarship, my teaching, and my community involvement, I focus on the production side of food systems, particularly on the role of immigrant labor and the treatment of farm workers. I have a forthcoming article in Food, Culture, and Society entitled “Visible Farmers/Invisible Workers: Locating Immigrant Labor in Food Studies.” I served as a consultant to the New England Coalition for Farmworker Justice and through my work as co-chair of the Drew University Sustainability Committee and adviser for the student organization, Students for Sustainable Food (SFSF), I have worked to increase the sustainability of my institution’s relation to local and non-local food systems. I am hopeful that participating in this seminar will help me draw stronger connections among my research, pedagogy, and advocacy work. I also hope to find new ways to develop a public humanities approach to my scholarship.

Specifically, in the next year, I hope to foster a relationship between food activism on campus and food advocacy work in our local communities. To this end, I enrolled in Drew University’s community-based learning pedagogy seminar in Summer 2011. I am working to integrate a community-based learning component into my regularly-offered course, Sustainable Harvests: Food Justice and U.S. Literature.

2011-2012 looks to be a particularly exciting year on the Drew University Campus for sustainable food systems. Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma has been selected as the first year reading. We are planning a series of events to create a campus-wide discussion about food systems. This will include a food focus in the annual campus Environmental Film Festival, a panel on slow foods, a panel of food systems workers, and a series of civic engagement events. Meanwhile, the Real Food Challenge (RFC) selected SFSF for their grassroots leadership program. RFC will be working with students to run a campaign to move Drew from 20% to 50% “Real Food.”

Two of the courses I will teach in 2011-2012 connect to the work of this student group. In the spring, I teach the Environmental Studies and Sustainability Senior Capstone. As part of this class, the students complete a collaborative project geared toward assessing and increasing the sustainability of the campus and/or community. In the Spring 2012 capstone class, the students will work with SFSF to propose a sustainable foods plan for Drew University. During the fall, I will be teaching Sustainable Harvests, the course mentioned above. I will be altering this class from its previous form to incorporate a community-based learning component. I am currently meeting with potential community partners. I hope the relationships with these organizations can also be sustained through some of the work my capstone students will be doing.

I am also working on two food-related environmental humanities book projects. Both projects analyze farm worker advocacy to better understand the relationships among race, immigration, and environmental justice in California’s agricultural fields. The first, The Nature of Citizenship: Race, Labor, and Nature in Representations of Californian Agricultural Labor builds from my dissertation to argue that ideologies of the natural shape the racial gate-keeping of the nation. The second, coauthored with a historian, examines the life and writings of Ernesto Galarza, who organized farm laborers in California prior to Cesar Chavez.