Biography:
Dr Wald is an Associate Professor of English and Environmental Studies at University of Oregon and whose teaching and research focuses on relationship between race and the environment, immigration and citizenship, food studies, environmental justice, and nature in popular culture. Dr. Wald’s first book and the focus of today’s conversation is The Nature of California; Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl which focuses on the paradoxical ways that farmers and farmworkers in California have been represented from the 1930s to the start of the twenty-first century. It examines the ways that depictions of farming and farm labor have never just been about those who labor in the earth, but have also presented a site to think through national belonging. The book exposes the process by which some people come to be seen as legitimately “American” while others are named as aliens, suggesting the ways in which the categories of natural and unnatural structure the U.S. system of racial gate-keeping.'
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