Dr. Rachel Slocum
The
UW-L Geography and Earth Science Department is pleased to
announce the appointment of Dr. Rachel Slocum to our faculty
beginning with the 2010 Fall Semester.
Rachel has a B.A. from McGill University in Montreal where she
studied Political Science and Developing Area Studies. She spent
several years in Niger, West Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer
and then in Washington D.C. working on international development
policy before going to Clark University for an M.A. in
International Development and Social Change. Working first with
Dianne Rocheleau for her M.A., she remained at Clark to get her
Ph.D. in Geography under the supervision of David Angel.
Rachel's graduate research began with work in Mali, West Africa,
where she studied women's and men's access to land in a large
government rice project called the Office du Niger. Having
become interested in Sahelian food and society questions while
working with Hausa and Tuareg people in Niger, this study was an
opportunity, provided by a Fulbright scholarship, to understand
international development, gender, and agriculture, after having
had some graduate training.
Pressing problems, specifically, U.S. responsibility for
greenhouse gas emissions and consumption of resources, brought
Rachel's attention back to the U.S. Her doctoral research
concerned U.S. cities' (Minneapolis, Tucson and Seattle) efforts
to lower their greenhouse gas emissions prior to action or
acknowledgment of climate change at the national level. The
difficulty of their task was not only practical (how to count
municipal emissions, where to reduce emissions), but also
philosophical and ethical--climate change, the collection of
gases in the troposphere that affects ocean currents,
temperatures, ecosystems and differently vulnerable people, was
a global phenomenon. How could it be a city problem? Cities
tended to address the issue by appealing to people's desire to
save money on their energy bill.
Continuing with her interest in nature-society questions, Rachel
began a study of race and the movement to make food systems more
local, research she continues to pursue. She uses ethnographic
methods to study racial identity in the context of this movement
nationally and locally (in the Twin Cities) and to explore the geographies of race and food through the
site of the Minneapolis Farmers' Market. She is interested in
racial inequality in local food, marketing and farming but also
in the way race attracts and food encourages antiracist
encounters. While at UW-L, she looks forward to working with
students, faculty and the University on questions of food and
justice and to teaching about gender, race, development and the
human-environment.
When not attached to her laptop or doing fieldwork, Rachel likes
knitting, yoga, running, reading fiction and enjoying the city
with her significant other, Arun. And when the season permits,
she loves to garden. She plans to construct a rain garden, plant
flowers and grasses native to the praire and grow
lots of vegetables.
For more on Dr. Slocum's background and research interests,
please feel free to visit her
personal web page.
On behalf of all UW-L Geography Department Faculty, staff and
students, we'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate Dr.
Slocum on her appointment and welcome her to our Department.