Graduate Student Research

Billy Hall, "Subsistence and the City: Geographies of Urban Food Provisioning in Miami-Dade"

PhD student, Global and Sociocultural Studies, dissertation advised by Gail Hollander

Image: billypic.jpg

My research interests center on the role of alternative and nonmarket food networks in shaping the development of urban landscapes, lives, and livelihoods. For my dissertation work, I am focusing on Miami-Dade as a case study to better understand how "food deserts" discourse, grant programs, urban development projects, governments, nonprofit food groups, local food businesses, locavores and foodies, community gardeners, social activists, and low-income communities collectively produce an alternative food network and restructure the local food system. I am largely interested in how these local interactions address, reproduce, and/or resist food access inequalities and how class, race, and ethnicity emerges through the highly varied forms of food system participation. Does spatializing vulnerability "other" those who live within the borders of "food deserts?" What kinds of practices and solutions does food deserts discourse make (im)possible? Do the ways in which individuals and communities grow, eat, buy, share, and talk about food open new possibilities for re-imagining and decolonizing racial identities?

Building off of ULTRA's framework for understanding vulnerability in the wake of climate change, I investigate how inequalities become constituted through both the social and the ecological world, tracing a dialectic between access to land and resources, political process, civic engagement, and the intra- and intercultural relations of Miami's transnational population. Because climate change events continue to present major challenges to the global food system in the way of droughts, shifting growing seasons, and unpredictable weather, the increasing volatility of food production and prices bears implications for the vulnerability of those groups most constrained economically, politically, and socially. Miami, a global city located in the hot and humid tropics and characterized by its unique cultural diversity (over 50% of residents are foreign-born), thus unfolds as a place for exploring important connections between the (re)localization of food systems, environmental change, urban restructuring, social activism and culture. As my interests in this project are both academic and personal, I am continually negotiating the ongoing praxis of situating my self and my actions within the often slippery and shifting roles between researcher, gardener, community resource, and active participant in the South Florida Food Policy Council.

Check out my latest ruminations and reflections at "What's Eating Miami". Constructive comments always appreciated!