Lessons from the (food) desert: Feminist legal geographies of the colonial desert imaginary

With Erica Zurawski, UC Santa Cruz.

Part of the School Lecture Series.

Introducing feminist legal geographies and environmental history, this seminar offers a critical discussion of how law and policy mediate, justify, and draw upon the violence that environmental imaginaries, discourses, and metaphors enact. Focusing specifically on the metaphor of a food desert, this talk outlines how the desert - metaphorical and otherwise - is utilized as a tool of domination and power.

This seminar shares some preliminary findings from my doctoral research which excavates the food desert metaphor to situate it both within the conjuncture of its origin and to document its intercontinental travel, documenting the environmental, spatial, and imperial imaginaries that it bakes in along the way. What is more, this talk demonstrates an investment in feminist legal geographies that foregrounds questions of power and resistance, by denoting the already-existing forms of resistance against these forms of domination. I conclude with a rumination on potential future research on feminist articulations of desert spaces.