Evan Hazelett

I have been a lifelong advocate of sustainability and social justice in agrifood systems, and spent most of the last decade either working in or researching agrifood systems to this end. Before the PhD, I worked on food waste, youth culinary education, equitable food sourcing, and food insecurity. 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. In the master in urban planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, I wrote my master’s thesis on nonprofit prison garden programs around the U.S., bringing together insights from (urban) political ecology, critical agrifood studies, Black geographies, and carceral geography. In August 2023, I co-founded the Critical Agrifood Working Group (CAWG) through the Berkeley Food Institute at UC Berkeley and have co-led it since.

For my dissertation, I am studying farmers selling at farmers markets in the Bay Area, California. I seek to document their varied characteristics as well as their varied experiences, challenges, and successes with land access/tenure, access to markets and (state) resources, financial planning, and farm operations generally. I investigate farm viability, farmer agency, agricultural practices, and farmer livelihoods through the lens of agrarian political economy as well as the cultural politics of farming through the varied motivations, goals, and values held by this diverse group of farmers. While it seems to me that the stark constraints of California’s agrarian political economy—exorbitant land prices, relatively robust but still minimal markets for organic and ecological farm products, wealth inequality, and racial inequality—place a tight limit on the potential for this group of farmers to grow and scale their (social and ecological) impact, I remain open to the possibilities that may emerge through the progressive potentials of the (local, alternative, organic) food movement. With the intent of documenting potential for farmer organizing, I am also curious about the constraints of private property with relation to agroecological transitions as well as the urban-rural and regional linkages/disjunctures central to a (dys)functional food system.

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