Belinda Ramírez

Belinda Ramírez (they/them) is a first-generation Colombian-American queer farmer-scholar. They received their PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California San Diego and most recently completed a postdoc as a Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE) Fellow at Stanford University (2021-2024), where they taught various liberal education courses including environmental sustainability, food and culture, and food/climate/environmental justice.

Ramírez’s interdisciplinary, engaged research interests center around the social, racial/ethnic, political, environmental/ecological and economic dimensions of urban agriculture and food justice movements within the modern industrialized and corporatized global food system. Ramírez’s scholarship uses ethnographic and mixed methods to investigate on-the-ground practices of local food production, procurement and advocacy, especially among BIPOC and low-income communities in the United States and Latin America. In this work, they demonstrate how people living in underserved urban spaces—who resiliently struggle with the myriad effects of food apartheid on diet, health and wellbeing—push for both individual and community autonomy and self-sufficiency through producing their own food and creating alternative food networks.

Ramírez’s upcoming project will center food justice/sovereignty and racial justice narratives in their family’s home country of Colombia. Ramírez considers themselves a farmer-scholar, having received agricultural training through local farms and community gardens across Tijuana-San Diego, Northern California’s Bay Area and beyond. They have also engaged in statewide political advocacy for young farmers through the National Young Farmers Coalition, served as both Board and Food Justice Co-Chair for Slow Food Urban San Diego, and currently serve as a member of Food Tank’s Academic Working Group.