2023 Thomas Marchione Food-as-a-Human-Right Student Award Winner!

We are happy to announce that the 2023 Thomas Marchione Food-as-a-Human-Right Student Award winner is Erica Zurawski (University of California Santa Cruz), with her project titled “Spatial Food Justice: Policy Mobilities of the ‘Food Desert’ Concept and the Socio-Legal Production of Inequitable Food Landscapes.”

Here is a brief bio and project summary from Erica:

Erica Zurawski is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of California Santa Cruz. She also holds a JD from the University of Wisconsin Law School where she concentrated on International and Environmental Law. Her research combines feminist legal geographies, critical urban studies, critical food studies, and environmental history to examine the social, legal, and material lives of the food desert metaphor.

As food injustices are exacerbated by compounding global events – from the Covid-19 pandemic and inflation to war and climate change disasters – efforts to address food inequities are more urgent than ever. Still, these efforts demand investigation, especially if they fall short of enacting meaningful change, or worse yet, reproduce the very inequities they set out to fix. Erica’s dissertation project, Spatial Food Justice: Policy Mobilities of the ‘Food Desert’ Concept and the Socio-Legal Production of Inequitable Food Landscapes, draws upon her legal training to engage a critical investigation of the various local and federal projects enacted in the name of ‘fixing food deserts.’ Her research aims to elucidate the connections and contingencies between space, law, and food to visibilize law’s role in reproducing geographies of food injustice with hopes of articulating how radical food justice efforts must attend to law’s complicity in the production of inequitable food landscapes and silencing of activist voices. Erica’s work has been generously supported by ASU’s Law & Science Dissertation Grant Program and the UC Global Food Initiative Fellowship.