About

Becky Smith is an Associate Professor in the Biomedical and Translational Sciences department at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She is involved in teaching a variety of courses including Introduction to Research, Applied Statistics for Biological Research, Principles and Methods of Epidemiology, Parasitology and Epidemiology Seminar, Pathobiology courses, and Research Projects. Her research focus is within biomedical and translational sciences, contributing to the advancement of medical education and research. She is actively engaged in the academic community, supporting research and innovation in health sciences.

Research topics

• Political science
• Sociology
• Environmental ethics
• Geography
• Business

Selected publications

• Climate storytelling often ignores young people – arts-based research can change that

  2026-02-06

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Women of Operation Breadbasket: A Lost Chapter in the Chicago Civil Rights Movement

  Journal of Black Studies · 2025-10-23

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This study is the first scholarly exploration of the Women of Operation Breadbasket (WOB). Founded in 1967 by Rev. Mrs. Willie T. Barrow, the WOB was the direct-action unit of Operation Breadbasket-Chicago (OB-C), the economic justice arm of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in the North. Placing Black women at the forefront of the movement in Chicago, the WOB empowered them to assert their agency in the pursuit of social change within their communities. Yet, the WOB remains woefully understudied, rendering it virtually invisible to scholars and the broader public. Consequently, fundamental questions emerge: What were the origins of the WOB? Who was Rev. Barrow, and what role did she play in the WOB? How did the WOB advance the civil rights movement in Chicago? What new insights can we gain by studying the WOB as an organizational site in the civil rights movement? To address these questions, I draw on womanist sociological theory to examine an intrinsic case study of the WOB, recovering this lost chapter in the Chicago civil rights movement. I conclude by considering how the mere existence of WOB is instructive and generative, opening up new avenues for future research.

  PublisherDOI

• Growing Gardens, Building Power: Food Justice and Urban Agriculture in Brooklyn

  Agricultural History · 2024-02-01 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Beginning in chapter 1 of Growing Gardens, Building Power, sociologist Justin Sean Myers makes clear that “gardens in East New York are not just about growing food: they are about growing dreams. . . . They are for growing community” (4–5). These words offer a key sound bite for Myers's well-researched, in-depth analysis of how gardens in the working-class Black, Latinx, and Caribbean neighborhood of East New York in Brooklyn clarify the social history and contemporary work of the urban food justice movement. Methodologically, Myers blends ethnography, interviews, and secondary sources to explore how the efforts of East New York Farms!, a food justice organization, reconfigures its local food system as a way to address racial, ethnic, and class inequities. This story transports the reader across time, space, and place, showing how historical and contemporary social, political, economic, and environmental forces collide in garden spaces. This collision brings into focus the power relations that activists in the food justice movement and the broader food movement navigate to get food from the garden to the homes that line the streets of urban neighborhoods across the nation.Reading the inequitable food realities and food justice activism of East New Yorkers through multiple histories, the five core chapters (2–6) of Growing Gardens, Building Power illuminate how the urban food justice movement struggles to achieve its vision. Chapter 2 examines the social history of East New York and how it shapes contemporary food realities. Chapter 3 shows how the long history of urban agriculture and gardening in New York City underscores the agency of East New Yorkers as they transform gardens into sites of social justice at the nexus of food, housing, and land. Chapter 4 weaves together histories of farmers' markets and food assistance programs—at the federal and state levels—to amplify how East New York Farms! makes sense of the interaction between the state and everyday food access in East New York. Chapter 5 examines the long history of social movement funding and how it provides the necessary context for understanding food justice struggles to secure and sustain financial support. Chapter 6 uses the history of Walmart's financial maneuverings as a critical context to understand how East New Yorkers successfully kept the multibillion-dollar company from building in their community and perpetuating inequities in grocery retailing that would challenge food justice work in East New York. The conclusion illustrates how the historical backdrops of each core chapter in Growing Gardens, Building Power are carefully connected to offer us a pathway forward in the context of six issues gleaned from the food justice stories of East New Yorkers.Through these stories of East New York Farms! and their agricultural comrades, Myers explores how urban food justice activists engage in the process of “countering a history of racism . . . redlining, urban renewal, planned shrinkage, and racialized systems of public and private divestment” (146). The food justice stories also provide a lens to examine how urban agricultural history shapes the future of urban food justice activism. This focus on urban agricultural history is important, given that scholarship on agricultural history tends to examine historical snapshots of issues in rural communities and the countryside. In thinking about how the history of urban agriculture interacts with multiple contemporary crises in East New York, Myers emphasizes how the multidimensionality of the food justice movement offers a way for scholars who work with agricultural history to think about how urban and rural agricultural histories converge and diverge.Together, the chapters that make up Growing Gardens, Building Power reveal how several histories shape the urban food justice movement in East New York. Each chapter is an example of how activists and their communities directly or indirectly navigate such histories. The chapters also reinvigorate scholarly and public conversations about interactions between the broader food movement and the food justice movement. How such conversations conceptualize these interactions is a site of contention, especially in the context of how they shape food futures. But what is clear is that both movements are context dependent and rooted in histories that emerge from within and beyond the food system. Growing Gardens, Building Power shows us how the food justice movement contextually transforms garden spaces into a place to imagine what a socially just food system could look like. Indeed, as Myers concludes, gardens offer possibilities that “can go a long way toward building a more just food system and with it a more just world” (156).

  PublisherDOI

• “What does Ferguson mean for the food justice movement?”: Reading Black visions of food justice in times of social unrest

  Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · 2024-08-09

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The August 2014 murder of unarmed Black teen­ager Michael Brown at the hands of the police in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, USA, sparked international attention, ignited a surge in #BlackLivesMatter protests, and reconfigured national discussions about race, police brutality, and state-sanctioned violence. Black food activists on the frontlines of the food justice movement grappled with Brown’s murder by joining together on a national call to address the question: What does Ferguson mean for the food justice move­ment? Answers to this question manifested into the 2015–2016 special digital series entitled “What Ferguson Means for the Food Justice Movement,” published online in the Food Justice Voices section of the WhyHunger organization website. In this article, we use a qualitative critical content analysis of the series to examine how Black food activists reframed agricultural and food systems in the con­text of the Ferguson struggle. We draw on intersec­tional agriculture theory to illuminate how Black food activists draft visions of food justice through three intersecting pathways: (1) critical Black agrari­anism, (2) radical Black mothering, and (3) Black futures. Our research reveals that Black visions of food justice in the wake of Ferguson are instructive and offer a fresh lens to understand the evolving landscape of Black food activism, given a set of racial, gendered, social, political, and economic realities. We conclude with a brief discussion on how these visions compel us to reconsider racial equity at the nexus of agriculture, food, and various forms of unrest in Black communities, providing insights for scholars, practitioners, and activists who work on issues of food justice.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Another Kind of Oppression

  2023-08-29

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Drawing on rarely used archival materials, newspapers, legislative hearings, and correspondences, this chapter documents a forgotten 1960s food stamps campaign that mobilized white grocers and their affiliates in the Delta. Led by the Lewis Grocer Company, Mississippi’s largest wholesaler-retailer at the time, the campaign used food stamps to transform food into an economic weapon against Black sharecropping communities. Civil rights activists like Fannie Lou Hamer knew this, as she described the federal food stamp program as “another kind of oppression.” This chapter reveals how the advent of food stamps in Mississippi was instigated by the president of the Lewis Grocer Company to protect the self-interests of white grocers and exert the company’s domination over commercial food spaces. This level of food power was shaped by white supremacy and rooted in the history of the Lewis Grocer Company’s role in the region’s plantation economy which in turn shaped the food realties of Black sharecroppers between the late 1800s and 1960s. The interactions between white grocery stores, plantation culture, and civil rights provide the necessary context for understanding how activists organized against the food stamps and the reemergence of emancipatory food power in the movement.

  PublisherDOI

• Food justice, intersectional agriculture, and the triple food movement

  2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction to the Symposium: Rethinking Food System Transformation—Food Sovereignty, Agroecology, Food Justice, Community Action and Scholarship

  2023-01-01

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• From Civil Rights to Food Justice

  2023-08-29

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Drawing on interviews, primary sources, newspapers, and media, this chapter fast-forwards to the present-day food story of the Mississippi civil rights movement. It examines how Black youth in the North Bolivar County Good Food Revolution (NBCGFR) in the Delta are extending the civil rights struggle for food and economic security initiated by the North Bolivar County Farm Cooperative (NBCFC) to generate an updated version of emancipatory food power. Many of the youth in the NBCGFR are descendants of Black sharecroppers in the Delta who navigated a plantation system that was designed to strip them of their agency and autonomy in the production, consumption, and distribution of food. While the geographic lines that demarcated large plantations in the region have disappeared, questions around food struggles in rural Black communities remain. Through agripreneurship, farming, and youth leadership development, the NBCGFR takes up these questions as they operationalize their vision for their growing food justice movement in the Delta. Working with the Delta Fresh Foods Initiative and local Black farmer-mentors, the NBCGFR builds on the past to build sustainable Black food futures where Black communities have food security and the power to dictate when, where, and how they access food.

  PublisherDOI

• Food Power Politics

  The University of North Carolina Press eBooks · 2023-01-01 · 24 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Food Power Politics

  2023-08-29

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This book unearths a food story buried deep within the soil of American civil rights history. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and oral histories, Bobby J. Smith II re-examines the Mississippi civil rights movement as a period when activists expanded the meaning of civil rights to address food as integral to sociopolitical and economic conditions. For decades, white economic and political actors used food as a weapon against Black sharecropping communities in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, but members of these communities collaborated with activists to transform food into a tool of resistance. Today, Black youth are building a food justice movement in the Delta to continue this story, grappling with inequalities that continue to shape their lives. Drawing on multiple disciplines including critical food studies, Black studies, history, sociology, and southern studies, Smith makes critical connections between civil rights activism and present-day food justice activism in Black communities, revealing how power struggles over food empower them to envision Black food futures in which communities have the full autonomy and capacity to imagine, design, create, and sustain a self-sufficient local food system.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Rachel Bezner Kerr

  Center for Global Development

  43 shared

• T. L. Pendergrast

  Cornell University

  23 shared

• Jeffrey Liebert

  Cornell University

  23 shared

• Sarah Riggs Stapleton

  2 shared

• Koen Beumer

  Utrecht University

  2 shared

• Lindsay Naylor

  2 shared

• Conny Almekinders

  1 shared

• Matteo Dell’Acqua

  Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, Development Sociology

  Cornell University

  2018