10/02/2020
We are so happy to announce our Keynote Speaker for DOPE 2021: Dr. Ashanté M. Reese!
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Dr. Ashanté M. Reese earned a PhD in Anthropology from American University in 2015. She also holds a bachelors of arts in History with a minor in African American studies from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Broadly speaking, Dr. Reese works at the intersection of critical food studies and Black geographies, examining the ways Black people produce and navigate food-related spaces and places in the context of anti-blackness. Animated by the question, who and what survives?, much of Dr. Reese’s work has focused on the everyday strategies Black people employ while navigating inequity. Her first book, Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C., takes up these themes through an ethnographic exploration of antiblackness and food access. Black Food Geographies won the 2020 Best Monograph Award from the Association for the Study of Food and Society and the 2020 Margaret Mead award from the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology. Her second book, Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice, is a collection co-edited with Hanna Garth that explores the geographic, social, and cultural dimensions of food in Black life across the U.S. Currently, Dr. Reese is working on a new project that explores the continuity of plantation geographies and abolitionist possibilities within rural and urban food systems vis-à-vis the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s agribusiness sector. Her work has had appeal both within and outside of academia through her writing in outlets such as The Feminist Wire, Gravy Magazine, Civil Eats, The New York Times, Bloomsberg, and Epicurious, among others.
