Laurel Bellante

Laurel Bellante, Ph.D., is a human-environment geographer specializing in food justice, global environmental change, critical agrarian studies, and sustainable food systems in both the United States and Mexico. She holds a position as assistant professor of practice and director of Food Studies in the School of Geography, Development, and Environment and assistant director of the Center for Regional Food Studies at the University of Arizona. She uses a political ecology approach to connect what is happening in people’s kitchens, farms, and communities to larger political economic and environmental changes occurring regionally, nationally, and globally. She has researched farmer vulnerability and organizing in southern Mexico, alternative food networks, poverty and climate change in the Southwestern U.S., carbon forestry programs in Latin America, and food security and food justice in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Her ongoing research projects focus on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in the regional food system of southern Arizona, strategies for building equity and resilience in local food systems, and understanding the promises and constraints of farmer movements in Mexico aimed at addressing the dual challenges of neoliberal capitalism and global environmental change.