Author and professor Psyche Williams-Forson will visit Gustavus on Wednesday, March 2, 2011. Her lecture, titled “Bet Your Bottom Dollar: Expanding the Concept of Alternatives in a Changing Food World, is part of Gustavus’s Global Insight 2010-2011 program on food and will be at 7 p.m. in F.W. Olin Hall, room 103. The lecture will discuss dollar stores, and other similar “value markets,” as a way to broaden the discussion of concepts like “sustainability” and “food access.”
Williams-Forson is the author of Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food and Power and an associate professor of American studies at the University of Maryland.
Williams-Forson has a bachelor’s degree in English/African American studies and women’s studies from the University of Virginia, a master’s degree in American studies and a certificate in women’s studies from the University of Maryland, and a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Maryland. She is the recipient of several fellowships including a Ford Foundation Diversity Postdoctoral Fellowship (2005) and a Lord Baltimore Research Fellowship (2006-07). She is also the curator of Still Cookin by the Fireside, an online text and photo exhibition on the history of African American cookery for the Smithsonian Institution’s Anacostia Museum.
“At a time when food access and security is heavily on the minds of food system researchers, it seems imperative that we consider many options including the role of the value market as a immediate place of food acquisition,” says Williams-Forson. “Based on preliminary research this talk encourages our consideration of value stores among other kinds of sites that can challenge how we define terms like ‘alternative’ and ‘sustainability’.”
This event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Professor of Philosophy Lisa Heldke at heldke@gustavus.edu or 507-933-7029.
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