Sandra Brown

Graduate Student
BA 1995 (Politics) UC Santa Cruz
Regional focus: The Americas

Picture of Sandra Brown

My decision to return to graduate school, following several years of community-labor organizing and farming, was sparked by a desire to engage geographically focused academic inquiry with direct social change implications. Most broadly I am interested in the political-economic and cultural geographies of agricultural restructuring, agrarian transformations, labor organization, and human migration. I am also interested in understanding how the emergence of new modes of governance and social movements focused on food might produce openings for altering the social and ecological relations of agricultural production. Thus far, my research has focused on the intersection of questions of scale, sustainability, and labor practices in international and domestic fair trade networks. I am currently conducting dissertation research on the role of fair trade certification in regulating production relations for independent producers and plantation workers in the Ecuadorian banana industry.

Selected publications

Brown, S. and Getz, C. (2008). “Towards Domestic Fair Trade? Farm labor, food localism, and the 'family scale' farm.” Geojournal, 73(1), 11-22.

Getz, C., Brown, S. and Shreck, A. (2008). “Class Politics and Agricultural Exceptionalism in California's Organic Agriculture Movement.” Politics and Society, 36(4), 478-507.

Brown, S. and Getz, C. (2008) “Privatizing Farm Worker Justice: regulating labor through voluntary certification and labeling.” Geoforum 39(3), 1184-1196.

Personal interests

Collective action and solidarity; challenging agrarian mythologies; surf; hikes; bowling alleys; good music.

Websites of interest

Grain.org
http://www.grain.org/front/

Food Not Lawns International
http://www.foodnotlawns.net/

The Farmworkers Website
http://www.farmworkers.org/

Delete the border.org
http://www.deletetheborder.org

LabourStart
http://labourstart.org/

Contact information

sandybrown@berkeley.edu