Ronald Rich
Education
- Ph.D., Southern Illinois University, 2003
Interests and Expertise
- Industrial agriculture
- Food systems
- Race and ethnicity in the US
Professional
Theoretically, I am interested in social, political and economic inequalities. I have turned that interest into research exploring the way that US agricultural industrialization is a form of development that traps primary agricultural producers in institutional and market-based relations of dependency through capitalist forms of organization. My fieldwork has focused on the US, but my interests run to global networks of food production and the inequities involved in food systems from which US consumers benefit. More recently this interest in the inequalities characterizing food production systems has shifted to distribution and consumption, especially issues of food access and networks in the US that exist outside of and challenge industrial food chains. I have also been teaching a course on racial and ethnic minorities in the US at EMU over the past four years, and have developed interests in anthropological/ethnographic approaches to race/ethnicity in the US and the ways that racial identities and inequalities have been and still are constructed in social, political, cultural and economic contexts.