Alison Hope Alkon
Biographic Data
| ID | 253248 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alison Hope Alkon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alison Hope |
| FAMILY NAME | Alkon |
| SIGNATURE | ALKON A H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Pacific |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8913-2776 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 298 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Climate Justice and the State
In the past decade, as environmental justice activist-scholars have engaged with critical social theories including the Black Radical Tradition, decolonial scholarship, urban political ecologies, and abolitionist thinking, they have debated whether the movement’s longstanding state-focused strategies can truly bring about a just and sustainable future. In the context of this debate, as well as the Trump administration’s evisceration of environmen…
Gardens of hope
A pedagogy for the end of the world
This article describes pedagogical changes that I have made to my Environmental Justice class at the University of the Pacific in response to increasingly crisis conditions with regard to both climate change and higher education. Over the past 15 years, my students are increasingly low-income, first generation, and from Stockton, a so-called “sacrifice zone” with abysmal environmental health outcomes in the heart of California’s Central Valley. M…
Getting Something to Eat in Jackson
Eating (with) the Other
This article aims to describe and theorize the role of food television in cultivating popular understandings of the relationship between food and race. Although there is burgeoning research on representations of food and identity, scholars have devoted much less attention to representations of race in food-related television programming. This article highlights the necessity of doing so through a comparative examination of shows that aim to expos…
Unequally vulnerable
Sowing Seeds of Displacement
Green gentrification is the process through which the elimination of hazardous conditions or the development of green spaces is mobilized as a strategy to draw in affluent new residents and capital projects. Based on observations and interviews in Oakland, California, we argue that food justice organizations seeking to promote access to healthy food in low-income communities can unwittingly create spaces that foster this process. Despite a desire…
Subverting the new narrative
Food justice
This article provides an evidence-based review of the growing field of food justice, which seeks to understand how inequalities of race, class and gender are reproduced and contested within food systems. Analyzing a database of peer-reviewed articles and books related to food justice in the US context ( n = 200), we find that food justice is a highly interdisciplinary research area organized around three central axes: social movement activism, th…
Organic Food
This entry describes organic food and farming, their history, and the ways sociologists have approached them
Food justice
This chapter offers an overview of food justice focused on its roots in environmental justice, alternative agriculture and food studies. Food justice scholarship and activism combine alternative agriculture&s;s critique of industrial food with environmental justice&s;s emphasis on the distribution of benefits and harms and food studies&s; attention to the links between food and identity. The chapter concludes by speculating on future directions f…
The Ethnic Restauranteur Krisnendu Ray Bloomsbury 2016
"The Ethnic Restauranteur Krisnendu Ray Bloomsbury 2016." Food and Foodways, 25(4), pp. 350–351
The Stockton Farmers’ Market
This paper investigates the social world of the predominantly Southeast Asian Stockton Farmers’ Market in Stockton, California. Through interviews and surveys with vendors and customers, their motivations for buying and selling at this market were analyzed. Respondents reported that affordable prices and access to profits were their primary motivations, though they were also interested in freshness, health, sustainability and community. For South…
Food Justice
Food justice refers to efforts to understand and combat the intersections between inequalities such as those of race, class, gender, national status, and the production, distribution, and consumption of food. Essential to the food justice movement is an analysis that problematizes the influence of race and class on the production, distribution, and consumption of food. Through food justice activism, low‐income communities and communities of color…
Food Systems in an Unequal World
The Socio‐Nature of Local Organic Food
The concept of socio‐nature asserts that social relations are inherently ecological and that ecological relations are inherently social. This paper examines how, and with what consequences, discourses and practices of support for local and organic food reflect this idea. It argues that proponents of local organic agriculture view the food they promote as simultaneously social and the product of human labor. However, advocates’ understanding of th…
Foodways of the urban poor
Black, White, and Green
Food sovereignty in US food movements
Environmental Inequalities Beyond Borders
Case studies demonstrate the spatial disconnect between global consumption and production and its effects on local environmental quality and human rights. Multinational corporations often exploit natural resources or locate factories in poor countries far from the demand for the products and profits that result. Developed countries also routinely dump hazardous materials and produce greenhouse gas emissions that have a disproportionate impact on …
Reflexivity and Environmental Justice Scholarship
This article explores the potential analytic and practical benefits that a reflexive, process-oriented approach to research and representation might hold for community-based environmental justice scholarship. Reflexive analysis can challenge the supremacy of positivist methods, illuminate the social production of knowledge, attend to the remaining influence of hierarchies of power and privilege, and aid academics and community members in developi…
Cultivating Food Justice
Documents how racial and social inequalities are built into our food system, and how communities are creating environmentally sustainable and socially just alternatives. Popularized by such best-selling authors as Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Eric Schlosser, a growing food movement urges us to support sustainable agriculture by eating fresh food produced on local family farms. But many low-income neighborhoods and communities of color …
Whiteness and Farmers Markets
Academics and activists highlight the potential for alternative agrifood movements to contribute to the evolving coalescence of justice and sustainability. This potential, however, is constrained by what scholars have identified as the prevalent whiteness of such movements. This paper uses ethnographic research at two northern California farmers markets to investigate how whiteness is performed and perpetuated through the movements’ discourses an…
Mapping the Food Movement
Julie Guthman
Foodways of the urban poor
Food sovereignty in US food movements
Whiteness and Farmers Markets
Academics and activists highlight the potential for alternative agrifood movements to contribute to the evolving coalescence of justice and sustainability. This potential, however, is constrained by what scholars have identified as the prevalent whiteness of such movements. This paper uses ethnographic research at two northern California farmers markets to investigate how whiteness is performed and perpetuated through the movements’ discourses an…
Breaking the Food Chains
This article develops the concept of food justice, which places access to healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate food in the contexts of institutional racism, racial formation, and racialized geographies. Through comparative ethnographic case studies, we analyze the demands for food justice articulated by the Karuk Tribe of California and the West Oakland Food Collaborative. Activists in these communities use an environmental justice frame t…
From value to values
The Socio‐Nature of Local Organic Food
The concept of socio‐nature asserts that social relations are inherently ecological and that ecological relations are inherently social. This paper examines how, and with what consequences, discourses and practices of support for local and organic food reflect this idea. It argues that proponents of local organic agriculture view the food they promote as simultaneously social and the product of human labor. However, advocates’ understanding of th…
Place Matters, But How? Rural Identity, Environmental Decision Making, and the Social Construction of Place
This article investigates the relationship between environmental policy and the social construction of place in two neighboring California counties. We examine two counties with dramatic geographic and sociodemographic differences that drew on similar place narratives in order to justify collaborative solutions to agricultural–environmental conflicts. Each narrative trumpets the importance of agriculture to each county's place character and prais…
Unequally vulnerable
Sowing Seeds of Displacement
Green gentrification is the process through which the elimination of hazardous conditions or the development of green spaces is mobilized as a strategy to draw in affluent new residents and capital projects. Based on observations and interviews in Oakland, California, we argue that food justice organizations seeking to promote access to healthy food in low-income communities can unwittingly create spaces that foster this process. Despite a desire…
Subverting the new narrative
Mapping the Food Movement
The Stockton Farmers’ Market
This paper investigates the social world of the predominantly Southeast Asian Stockton Farmers’ Market in Stockton, California. Through interviews and surveys with vendors and customers, their motivations for buying and selling at this market were analyzed. Respondents reported that affordable prices and access to profits were their primary motivations, though they were also interested in freshness, health, sustainability and community. For South…
A pedagogy for the end of the world
This article describes pedagogical changes that I have made to my Environmental Justice class at the University of the Pacific in response to increasingly crisis conditions with regard to both climate change and higher education. Over the past 15 years, my students are increasingly low-income, first generation, and from Stockton, a so-called “sacrifice zone” with abysmal environmental health outcomes in the heart of California’s Central Valley. M…
Place, Stories, and Consequences
Faced with a visible and controversial instance of erosion on vineyards, the Lake County, California, Board of Supervisors founded an unusual organization—the Erosion Protection Education Commission (EPEC)—to offer nonbinding advice to grape growers concerning relevant agro-management practices. This study uses in-depth interviews, fieldwork, and secondary sources to contextualize EPEC within the county’s stories about place—within its heritage n…
Place Matters, But How? Rural Identity, Environmental Decision Making, and the Social Construction of Place
This article investigates the relationship between environmental policy and the social construction of place in two neighboring California counties. We examine two counties with dramatic geographic and sociodemographic differences that drew on similar place narratives in order to justify collaborative solutions to agricultural–environmental conflicts. Each narrative trumpets the importance of agriculture to each county's place character and prais…
From value to values
Breaking the Food Chains
This article develops the concept of food justice, which places access to healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate food in the contexts of institutional racism, racial formation, and racialized geographies. Through comparative ethnographic case studies, we analyze the demands for food justice articulated by the Karuk Tribe of California and the West Oakland Food Collaborative. Activists in these communities use an environmental justice frame t…
Environmental Inequalities Beyond Borders
Case studies demonstrate the spatial disconnect between global consumption and production and its effects on local environmental quality and human rights. Multinational corporations often exploit natural resources or locate factories in poor countries far from the demand for the products and profits that result. Developed countries also routinely dump hazardous materials and produce greenhouse gas emissions that have a disproportionate impact on …
Reflexivity and Environmental Justice Scholarship
This article explores the potential analytic and practical benefits that a reflexive, process-oriented approach to research and representation might hold for community-based environmental justice scholarship. Reflexive analysis can challenge the supremacy of positivist methods, illuminate the social production of knowledge, attend to the remaining influence of hierarchies of power and privilege, and aid academics and community members in developi…
Cultivating Food Justice
Documents how racial and social inequalities are built into our food system, and how communities are creating environmentally sustainable and socially just alternatives. Popularized by such best-selling authors as Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Eric Schlosser, a growing food movement urges us to support sustainable agriculture by eating fresh food produced on local family farms. But many low-income neighborhoods and communities of color …
Whiteness and Farmers Markets
Academics and activists highlight the potential for alternative agrifood movements to contribute to the evolving coalescence of justice and sustainability. This potential, however, is constrained by what scholars have identified as the prevalent whiteness of such movements. This paper uses ethnographic research at two northern California farmers markets to investigate how whiteness is performed and perpetuated through the movements’ discourses an…
Mapping the Food Movement
Black, White, and Green
Food sovereignty in US food movements
The Socio‐Nature of Local Organic Food
The concept of socio‐nature asserts that social relations are inherently ecological and that ecological relations are inherently social. This paper examines how, and with what consequences, discourses and practices of support for local and organic food reflect this idea. It argues that proponents of local organic agriculture view the food they promote as simultaneously social and the product of human labor. However, advocates’ understanding of th…
Foodways of the urban poor
Food Systems in an Unequal World
The Stockton Farmers’ Market
This paper investigates the social world of the predominantly Southeast Asian Stockton Farmers’ Market in Stockton, California. Through interviews and surveys with vendors and customers, their motivations for buying and selling at this market were analyzed. Respondents reported that affordable prices and access to profits were their primary motivations, though they were also interested in freshness, health, sustainability and community. For South…
Food Justice
Food justice refers to efforts to understand and combat the intersections between inequalities such as those of race, class, gender, national status, and the production, distribution, and consumption of food. Essential to the food justice movement is an analysis that problematizes the influence of race and class on the production, distribution, and consumption of food. Through food justice activism, low‐income communities and communities of color…
Food justice
This chapter offers an overview of food justice focused on its roots in environmental justice, alternative agriculture and food studies. Food justice scholarship and activism combine alternative agriculture&s;s critique of industrial food with environmental justice&s;s emphasis on the distribution of benefits and harms and food studies&s; attention to the links between food and identity. The chapter concludes by speculating on future directions f…
The Ethnic Restauranteur Krisnendu Ray Bloomsbury 2016
"The Ethnic Restauranteur Krisnendu Ray Bloomsbury 2016." Food and Foodways, 25(4), pp. 350–351
Food justice
This article provides an evidence-based review of the growing field of food justice, which seeks to understand how inequalities of race, class and gender are reproduced and contested within food systems. Analyzing a database of peer-reviewed articles and books related to food justice in the US context ( n = 200), we find that food justice is a highly interdisciplinary research area organized around three central axes: social movement activism, th…
Organic Food
This entry describes organic food and farming, their history, and the ways sociologists have approached them
Subverting the new narrative
Unequally vulnerable
Sowing Seeds of Displacement
Green gentrification is the process through which the elimination of hazardous conditions or the development of green spaces is mobilized as a strategy to draw in affluent new residents and capital projects. Based on observations and interviews in Oakland, California, we argue that food justice organizations seeking to promote access to healthy food in low-income communities can unwittingly create spaces that foster this process. Despite a desire…
Eating (with) the Other
This article aims to describe and theorize the role of food television in cultivating popular understandings of the relationship between food and race. Although there is burgeoning research on representations of food and identity, scholars have devoted much less attention to representations of race in food-related television programming. This article highlights the necessity of doing so through a comparative examination of shows that aim to expos…
Getting Something to Eat in Jackson
Political science (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Organic Food and Agriculture (17 works) · Law (14 works) · Agriculture (13 works) · Economic Justice (13 works) · Economics (12 works) · Geography (12 works) · Urban Agriculture and Sustainability (12 works) · Environmental justice (10 works)