Food, Place, and Power Workshop: Heather Paxson

The Workshop in the History and Geography of Food, Place, and Power will host Heather Paxson, who is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Paxson will present her paper "Regulating Microbial Ecologies: Policy and Practice in Artisanal Cheesemaking." Download a copy of the paper at the FPP website.

Heather Paxson is interested in how people craft a sense of themselves as moral beings through everyday practices, especially those activities having to do with family and food. She is the author of two ethnographic monographs: Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece (University of California Press, 2004) and The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America (University of California Press, 2012). Her recent work explores domestic artisanal cheese and the people who make it, analyzing how craftwork has become a new source of cultural and economic value within American landscapes of production and consumption.