NCID-1206
Jessica Walker
Assistant Professor of American Culture & Afroamerican and African Studies
University of Michigan and 2018 LSA Collegiate Fellow (American Culture)
Education/Degree:
1 American Studies (University of Maryland, College Park)
About
Dr. Walker's commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is very much reflected in her pedagogy. Her teaching philosophy emphasizes engaged and responsive one-on-one mentoring and creating space for a range of diverse voices both in content and classroom discussion. She works with students to not only expand how race and gender are analyzed in studies of food, space, and identity, but to also mentor and support underrepresented student populations.As a recent lecturer teaching fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Walker worked on creating case studies that help faculty from various fields build in-class activities that teach the racialization of food in the United States. Her goal in all her research, mentoring, and teaching is to create space for a more diverse academy, one built in and through complexity and tension. As a mentor, faculty instructor, and fellow for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program, Dr. Walker has dedicated her professional career to attending to the importance and value of diversifying institutions of higher education.
Current Work
Dr. Walker's manuscript, Her Kitchen is The World: Black Women and the Culture of Soul Food, traces the construction of soul food using cookbooks, USDA narrative reports, television, and film. The project conceptualizes soul food as a battleground for Black representation within popular culture. These con,ations often play out through representations of Black womanhood and domestic space. Her Kitchen Is the World finds that these images often implicate shifting ideologies of citizenship and national belonging, race, nutrition, and gendered divisions of labor.
Research Area Keyword(s)
Black feminist theory, critical food studies, space and place