Featured Faculty - Kristin Reynolds: Urban Agriculture and Environmental Justice
Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Food Studies Kristin Reynolds is interested how scholarship can contribute to socially just urban food and environmental systems.Her forthcoming book, Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City, focuses on the need to address the structural levels of injustice in order to create more liberatory systems. As an action research project, Beyond the Kale highlights the work of people of color using urban agriculture to advance social justice and examines how scholars can support this work through collaborative and participatory research, and by contextualizing on-the-ground problems in broader policy frameworks.With her book in press, Reynolds is exploring a comparative study of policies and funding programs that support rooftop urban agriculture in New York City and Paris, with partial support from the Tishman Environment and Design Center. Both cities have extensive rooftop agriculture systems as well as policies and agency incentives that support them. The research will examine environmental justice implications of these programs, with a goal of identifying policy initiatives that may help to address community-scale resilience. She will travel to Paris over the semester break to present a seminar on social-geographic research methods in urban agriculture for students and faculty at L’Université Paris VIII and AgroParisTech. During her visit, she will identify further opportunities for the study. In spring 2016, Reynolds and a graduate student research assistant will continue developing this project, including identifying ways to assess priorities of urban agriculture and environmental justice organizations vis à vis green infrastructure programs in their communities.
Student Opportunities with Dr. Reynolds
Dr. Reynolds will be teaching Designing Urban Agriculture; Food and the Environment; and a new course, Green Roof Ecology (co-taught with Timon McPhearson, Assistant Professor of Urban Ecology and Chair of the Environmental Studies program) in Spring 2016.
To share sustainability-related projects and research, please email tedc@newschool.edu and include: name, title, program, two images and 150 words describing the project.