Participants
Richard Wilk
Richard Wilk is Provost Professor of anthropology at Indiana University where he directs the Food Studies Program. With a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Arizona, he has taught at the University of California Berkeley, University of California Santa Cruz, New Mexico State University, and University College London, and has held fellowships at Gothenburg University, the Centre Norbert Elias of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Marseille and the University of London. His research in Belize, Europe, the USA and West Africa has been supported by three Fulbright fellowships, grants from the National Science Foundation, and from many other organizations. He has also worked as an applied anthropologist with UNICEF, USAID, USDA, Cultural Survival and a variety of other development agencies, and has served as President of the Society for Economic Anthropology and serves on the Task for on Climate Change of the American Anthropological Association. His initial research on the cultural ecology of indigenous Mayan farming and family organization was followed by work on consumer culture and sustainable consumption, energy consumption, globalization, television, beauty pageants and food. Much of his recent work has turned towards the history of food, the linkages between tourism and sustainable development, and the origin of modern masculinity. Wilk is the co-editor of two book series, "Globalization and the Environment"(Altamira) and "Consumption and Public Life" (Palgrave Macmillan). His publications include more than 150 papers and book chapters, a textbook in Economic Anthropology, and several edited volumes. The most recent books are Time, Consumption, and Everyday Life (with Elizabeth Shove and Frank Trentmann) and WAYNE_PACELLE (with Livia Barbosa).
Wayne Pacelle
As President and CEO of The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), Wayne Pacelle leads the nation's largest animal protection organization with 11 million members and constituents. The organization is the 155th largest charity in the United States. During his tenure, Pacelle has nearly doubled the size of the organization and, through corporate combinations with groups such as The Fund for Animals and the Doris Day Animal League, built unity and greater efficiency within the animal protection cause. He has led successful efforts to pass hundreds of new state and federal laws to protect animals, expanded The HSUS's animal care operations, and worked with dozens of corporations to enact operational changes that benefit animals. Pacelle was named one of NonProfit Times' "Executives of the Year" in 2005 for his leadership in responding to the Hurricane Katrina crisis. In both 2008 and 2009, NonProfit Times named Pacelle to its annual "Power and Influence Top 50" nonprofit executives. In 2008, the National Italian American Foundation presented Pacelle with the Special Achievement Award in Humanitarian Service. In 2010, Pacelle received the Knight of Honor Award from Notre Dame High School. Pacelle is the author of "The Bond: Our Kinship with Animals, Our Call to Defend Them," published in April 2011. He graduated from Yale University in 1987.
Winona LaDuke
Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe), the author of six books, is a rural development economist and activist. A graduate of Harvard, with graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Masters in Rural Development Antioch University. LaDuke has devoted her life to protecting the lands and life ways of Native communities. In 1994, Time magazine named her one of America's fifty most promising leaders under forty years of age, and in 1997 she was named Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year. In 2007, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
Other honors include the Reebok Human Rights Award, the Thomas Merton Award, the Ann Bancroft Award, the Global Green Award, and the prestigious International Slow Food Award for working to protect wild rice and local biodiversity. LaDuke also served as Ralph Nader's vice-presidential running mate on the Green Party ticket in the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections. In addition to numerous articles, LaDuke is the author of Last Standing Woman (fiction), All Our Relations (non-fiction), In the Sugarbush (children's non-fiction), and The Winona LaDuke Reader, and Recovering the Sacred: the Power of Naming and Claiming (South End Press). Her most recent book, the Militarization of Indian Country is forthcoming from Michigan State Press in the fall of 2011.
An enrolled member of the Mississippi band of Ojibwe, LaDuke lives with her family on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota. She is also the Founding Director of the White Earth Land Recovery Project, a reservation based non-profit devoted to restoring the land-base and culture of the White Earth Anishinaabeg. She helped found Honor the Earth in 1993 and has served in a leadership position since the organization's inception.
She continues to work on issues of sustainable development, ecological economics, food security and food sovereignty and resiliency strategies in a time of climate change. Her lectures span these areas, as well as Native American rights, Principled Leadership development, and Economics for the Seventh Generation.
Jo Luck
Jo Luck is a 2010 World Food Prize Laureate and former president of Heifer International, having served as the organization's president from 2010 to 2011, its president/CEO from 1992 to 2010, and its director of International Programs from 1989 to 1992.
She has been appointed by President Barack Obama to serve on the U.S. Agency for International Development's Board for International Food and Agricultural Development, which advises USAID administrators on agricultural development priorities and issues as they relate to famine and hunger. Additionally, she is a member of the "DuPont and Pioneer Advisory Committee on Agriculture Innovation and Productivity," The Chicago Council's "Global Agricultural Development Initiative" and the Farm Foundation "Dialogue on Food and Agriculture in the 21st Century" Steering Committee.
She has received numerous awards, including the Forbes Executive Women's Forum "Trailblazer Award"; the International Women's Forum "Women Who Make a Difference" award; and Rotary's "Service Above Self." Additionally, Heifer International has been recognized with several awards including the Martin Luther King, Jr. Commission "Salute to Greatness"; the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize, the largest financial award given to a non-profit each year; and Bon Appetit's Humanitarian Award.
Jo Luck is the recipient of several honorary degrees in the humanitarian area. She is the former Board Chair of InterAction, the largest alliance of U.S.-based international development and humanitarian nongovernmental organizations working to overcome poverty, exclusion and suffering by advancing social justice and basic dignity for all.
Amie Breeze Harper
A. Breeze Harper is a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Davis, in the geography graduate group. She is applying critical race and critical whiteness theories to her major in critical food geographies. Harper is investigating how black identified females are educated to make their food and health choices and determine what is "natural." She is also the creator and editor of the book Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society (Lantern Books 2010). Sistah Vegan explores food politics, identity, sexuality, health, womanism, feminism, decolonization, anti-racism, eco-sustainability, and animal rights through the lens of the black female vegan experience in the USA. It is the first volume of its kind to address the racialized-gender vegan experience in the USA.
