BIO
Jennifer E. Gaddis is an assistant professor of Civil Society and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She brings a feminist perspective to food politics through her research on the social, political, and economic organization of public school lunch programs. Her first book, The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools, is a work of activist scholarship that centers the perspectives of school lunch activists and frontline cafeteria workers who are fighting for food justice in communities across the United States.
Her second book-length project draws on fieldwork in China, Japan, and South Korea to examine how civil society activism, corporate interests, and national policy priorities shape the social justice and ecological goals of government-sponsored school lunch programs. By uncovering how, when, and to what extent school lunch programs operate as a site of resistance to the status quo—in terms of advancing food sovereignty, just labor practices, and ecological sustainability—this research will offer insight into just how pervasive the social expectation that school lunch, and care more broadly, should be “cheap,” and what can be done to shift the conversation to a more generative space from which to collectively reimagine the social organization of care through public institutions.
At UW-Madison, Dr. Gaddis is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies, the Center for Cooperatives, the Center for Child and Family Well-being, and the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems. She serves on the advisory boards for the Havens-Wright Center for Social Justice and the School for Workers and as the faculty advisor for Slow Food UW. She also co-leads two community-based research projects that involve graduate students in the Civil Society and Community Research PhD program. The first project, in South Madison, Wisconsin, examines food justice and culinary agency among an inter-generational group of parents, children, and youth. The second project, in Fort Peck, Montana, supports community-led efforts to build food sovereignty both on the reservation and across Turtle Island (North America) through place-based action research and an innovative oral history project designed to assist the emerging trade-based solidarity economy by connecting geographically disparate Indigenous food sovereignty initiatives and making their products more accessible to Native people living on and off reservations.
View her complete Curriculum Vitae here.
Her second book-length project draws on fieldwork in China, Japan, and South Korea to examine how civil society activism, corporate interests, and national policy priorities shape the social justice and ecological goals of government-sponsored school lunch programs. By uncovering how, when, and to what extent school lunch programs operate as a site of resistance to the status quo—in terms of advancing food sovereignty, just labor practices, and ecological sustainability—this research will offer insight into just how pervasive the social expectation that school lunch, and care more broadly, should be “cheap,” and what can be done to shift the conversation to a more generative space from which to collectively reimagine the social organization of care through public institutions.
At UW-Madison, Dr. Gaddis is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies, the Center for Cooperatives, the Center for Child and Family Well-being, and the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems. She serves on the advisory boards for the Havens-Wright Center for Social Justice and the School for Workers and as the faculty advisor for Slow Food UW. She also co-leads two community-based research projects that involve graduate students in the Civil Society and Community Research PhD program. The first project, in South Madison, Wisconsin, examines food justice and culinary agency among an inter-generational group of parents, children, and youth. The second project, in Fort Peck, Montana, supports community-led efforts to build food sovereignty both on the reservation and across Turtle Island (North America) through place-based action research and an innovative oral history project designed to assist the emerging trade-based solidarity economy by connecting geographically disparate Indigenous food sovereignty initiatives and making their products more accessible to Native people living on and off reservations.
View her complete Curriculum Vitae here.