Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern
Graduate Student
BA 2004 (Sustainable Agriculture and Development with Concentration in Latin American Studies) Cornell University
Regional focus: The Americas
My dissertation investigates farmworker food insecurity in California, with a focus on immigrant gardeners and farmers. My current fieldwork, located in the Northern Central Coast of California, emphasizes approaches from Critical Food Studies, Agrarian Political Ecology, Feminist Geography, and Critical Race Theory. As an undergraduate at Cornell University I completed an honors thesis based on my fieldwork, researching the implementation of the Green Revolution and possibilities for organic agriculture in Guatemala. In addition to my academic work in the field of food and agriculture studies, I have spent many years working on farms and with agriculture and food organizations in Guatemala, New York State and California.
Selected publications
Publications
Minkoff-Zern, Laura-Anne. October 2011. “Pushing the Boundaries of Indigeneity and Agricultural Knowledge: Oaxacan Immigrant Community Gardening in California.” Agriculture and Human Values.
Minkoff-Zern, Laura-Anne, Nancy Peluso, Jennifer Sowerwine and Christy Getz. October 2011. “Race and Regulation: Asian Immigrants in California Agriculture.” In Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class and Sustainability. Alison Alkon and Julian Agyeman, eds. MIT Press.
Minkoff-Zern, Laura-Anne and Christy Getz. 2011. “Bringing Farmworkers in Food Justice.” Race, Poverty, and the Environment. Vol 18. No 1.
Minkoff-Zern, Laura-Anne. In Press. “A Review of Free for All: Fixing School Food in America.” Food and Foodways.
Minkoff-Zern, Laura-Anne. 2010. “Agribusiness.” In Green Food, An A-to-Z Guide, Dustin J. Mulvaney and Paul Robbins, eds. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Professional Papers
Gillon, Sean, Minkoff, Laura-Anne, and Thistlethwaite, Rebecca. 2007. Grounding Ourselves: Innovative Land Tenure Models in California and Beyond. California Food and Justice Network Working Paper. Community Food Security Coalition. Reprinted 2008. In Farmer’s Guide to Securing Land. Sebastopol, CA: California Farmlink.
Minkoff, Laura-Anne. Local and Alternative Practices for Soil Fertility in San Lucas Tolimán, Guatemala. 2004. Resource document for The Mesoamerican Institute for Permaculture (IMAP), San Lucas Tolimán, Guatemala.
Minkoff, Laura-Anne. Land Ownership in Guatemala. 2004. Resource document for the Network in Solidarity With the People of Guatemala (NISGUA), Washington DC.
