My thematic research interests center upon food and agriculture, rural poverty and inequality, and rural development and environmental change. Currently, I am particularly interested in the ways that representations of places and people, culture, politics, and economics shape the production, distribution and consumption of food around the world and at home.

I remain interested in the ways in which social and economic identities are materially and discursively forged in order to foster, rework or maintain divisions and inequalities among groups and individuals. I employ insights from Marxist, feminist and poststructural theory to understand the linkages among politics, economics, poverty and social and environmental change in rural places. I retain ongoing interests in gender and labor processes, political economy/ecology and critical development studies. My regional research focuses upon southern Africa and the northwest United States.

My current research centers upon investigating the material and political outcomes related to the discursive shift that once defined 'hunger' as a fundamental social problem to that of 'food security' as a new measurement and representation of poverty and food scarcity.. I explore this shift in World Bank and FAO policy as well as in case studies drawn from southern Africa and the US.

A second project, collaborative with Vicky Lawson and Anne Bonds, investigates how people understand rural poverty and inequality and class and racialized differences in the context of high in-migration and rapid development and economic change in the nonmetropolitan Northwest. This project examines the persistence of poverty in the midst of economic restructuring and migration in rural places of the American West focusing upon Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana.