Rate My Professor Alison Alkon

Alison Hope Alkon is the Teaching Professor of Community Studies in the Sociology Department and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, within the Social Sciences Division. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Davis, awarded in 2008. Prior to her current position, Alkon was Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of the Pacific from 2008 onward. In 2019 and 2020, she served as a Fulbright Scholar at Barcelona Autonomous University in Spain, focusing on 'The Taste of a Changing Place.' Her scholarship centers on how racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, settler colonialism, and unequal climate crises manifest in food and agricultural systems, and how social movements counter these through justice-oriented, sustainable, and joyful practices. Core research interests encompass sustainable and just food systems, climate justice, environmental justice, racial inequalities and identities, pedagogy and practice, community-based teaching, experiential learning, engaged and co-created pedagogies, and food, environmental, climate, and racial justice. Alkon teaches courses including Community Studies 137: Communities and Climate Change, Community Studies 186: Food and Agricultural Social Movements, Community Studies 107: Analysis of Field Materials, and Community Studies 105 and 106: Field Study.

Alkon has produced five books, including her forthcoming Nurturing Food Justice, co-edited with Julian Agyeman (MIT Press, 2025); A Recipe for Gentrification: Food Power and Resistance in the City, with Josh Sbicca and Yuki Kato (NYU Press, 2020); The New Food Activism: Opposition, Confrontation and Cooperation, with Julie Guthman (University of California Press, 2017); Black White and Green: Race, Farmers Markets and the Green Economy (University of Georgia Press, 2012); and Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability, with Julian Agyeman (MIT Press, 2011). Notable peer-reviewed publications include 'A Pedagogy for the End of the World: Teaching Environmental Health and Justice in a Sacrifice Zone' (Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 2024); 'Food Intersections and Interconnections: Rethinking Food and Gentrification in Light of the Covid-19 Pandemic' (in Radical Food Geographies, 2024); 'Eating (With) the Other: Race in Food Television' (Gastronomica, 2021); 'Unequally Vulnerable: A Food Justice Approach to Racial Disparities in COVID-19 Cases' (Agriculture and Human Values, 2020); and 'Food Justice: Cultivating the Field' (Environmental Research Letters, 2018). She delivered the plenary address 'From Companion Planting to Cross-Pollination: Thoughts on the Future of Food Studies' (Graduate Journal of Food Studies, 2018). Alkon's contributions have shaped scholarly discourse on food justice, urban agriculture, gentrification, and environmental inequities.