Rethinking Food System Transformation

Rachel Bezner Kerr is a Professor in Global Development at Cornell University, and does research in Africa on sustainable agriculture, gender, climate change adaptation, food security and nutrition. She has published over 80 scientific articles. She was a Coordinating Lead Author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Dr. Bezner Kerr also served as a member of the High Level Panel of Experts for the United Nations Committee for World Food Security, coauthoring the 2019 report on agroecology. She has carried out participatory research with farmers in Malawi and Tanzania on agroecology, nutrition and climate-change related studies. Dr. Bezner Kerr attained her PhD in Development Sociology at Cornell University.

• Introduction to the symposium: rethinking food system transformation—food sovereignty, agroecology, food justice, community action and scholarship.- Food justice, intersectional agriculture, and the triple food movement.-Pockets of peasantness: small-scale agricultural producers in the Central Finger Lakes region of upstate New York.- Action research on organizational change with the Food Bank of the Southern Tier: a regional food bank’s efforts to move beyond charity.- Gardens and Green Spaces: placemaking and Black entrepreneurialism in Cleveland, Ohio.- Participatory plant breeding and social change in the Midwestern United States: perspectives from the Seed to Kitchen Collaborative.- To save the bees or not to save the bees: honey bee health in the Anthropocene.