Valerie Imbruce

Education

• Ph.D, Economic Botany, Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2006
• BA, Environmental Science, Binghamton University, 1999

Research and Teaching Spotlight

I have always worked at the human-environment nexus with a commitment to interdisciplinary research and education. My long-term research has focused on sustainability, resilience, and equity in food systems. The site I have worked in most deeply is Manhattan’s Chinatown, a historic and vibrant immigrant neighborhood with a strong multi-ethnic food identity. In my book, From Farm to Canal Street, I tell the story of how Chinatown’s food system operates amid - and against – global trend towards consolidation and homogenization of food production and distribution. This work is based on a decade of ethnographic research to understand a food system that displays unique and alternative characteristics and to bring minority, immigrant communities into the discourse on food systems. From a structural approach that highlighted how a food system in built through producers and distributors social networks and lived experiences, I turned to engagement with community organizations and advocates to celebrate, promote and document the resilience of this community in the face of gentrification and discrimination that was amplified during the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

I hold an ethic in my research and teaching to focus on issues where I live, in the tradition of place-based education. I have developed curriculum for undergraduate research courses in environmental studies, that are still in use, on how environments are socially constructed in Bennington, VT, when I taught at Bennington College, and in Binghamton, NY, when I taught at Binghamton University. I also have interest in applied anthropological approaches, leading me to participate in and contribute use-driven research for food councils in Bennington, Vermont, Broome County, New York and now Kent County, Maryland. I am a member of the Food Justice Working Group at Binghamton University and have been contributing to a project that develops comparison sets of food action plans for newly forming food councils to aid their goal setting and framing of issues that such a group can successfully focus on.

 

Teaching

• ANT 194 Field Ethnobotany
• ANT 394 Community Food Systems