Evan Hazelett

I have been a lifelong advocate of more sustainable and socially/racially just agrifood systems, and spent most of the last decade either working in or researching agrifood systems to this end. Prior to completing a master in urban planning, I worked in food waste and youth culinary education, and just before starting my PhD I worked at a food distribution hub serving food insecure people, running the pantry and doing research and advocacy. During my master’s, I worked as a Research Assistant on two projects, one on restaurant sourcing practices as part of Catherine Brinkley’s Environment, Land, and Food Systems (ELFS) Lab at UC Davis and the other on prison agriculture as part of Josh Sbicca’s Prison Agriculture Lab (PAL) at Colorado State University. I wrote my master’s thesis on nonprofit prison garden programs around the country, bringing together insights from (urban) political ecology, critical agrifood studies, Black geographies, and carceral geography. I am currently launching/co-leading the Critical Agrifood Working Group (CAWG) alongside peers on the Berkeley Food Institute’s Graduate Council at UC Berkeley.

For my dissertation, I am studying the constraints facing direct market farmers vending at farmers markets in the Bay Area, California. I am curious how the viability of direct market farming, farmer agency in pursuit of socioecological practices, and possibilities for more radical organizing in U.S. alternative food movements are impacted by: 1) structural impediments around land tenure from racialized, capitalist land and property regimes, 2) lack of access to adequate state resources and support networks, and 3) the cultural politics of alternative food, especially the agrarian imaginary of the independent yeoman farmer. I am also interested in thinking through complex urban-rural and regional linkages in agrifood systems, as well as how insights from land sovereignty movements of the global south might be applied to U.S. agrifood organizing, particularly in terms of land and property reform.

Publications

Hazelett E 2023 Greening the Cage: Exploitation and Resistance in the (Un)Sustainable Prison Garden. Antipode, 55(2):436-457. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/anti.12893

Hazelett E 2021 Op-ed: Despite Providing Respite and Healing, Prison Gardens Can Perpetuate Racial Injustices. Civil Eats, 16 Aug 2021. https://civileats.com/2021/08/16/op-ed-despite-providing-respite-and-hea...

Hazelett E 2021 COVID-19 Has Perpetuated Pre-Existing Injustices in the Food System. Berkeley Food Network blog. https://www.berkeleyfoodnetwork.org/covid-19-has-perpetuated-pre-existin...

Supervisor

Michael Ekers