Megan A. Carney (PhD 2012, UC Santa Barbara)

Research Interests:
Transborder and diaspora studies; political economy/ecology of food, health and the body; critical race, class, and gender theory; citizenship and the state; violence and borderlands; food sovereignty; food security; U.S.; Latin America; Southern Europe.

"Currently, I am developing two postdoctoral research projects. The first project, “Food As Violence: Transborder Mothers, Docile Bodies, and State Practice in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” resumes questions from my dissertation fieldwork. The goals of this project are to interrogate the ways that food is central to gendered migration and to trace discourses about food in diaspora. Funded by UC MEXUS, the Chicano Studies Institute, and the Institute for Labor and Employment, my dissertation examined the lived experience of poverty, state approaches to migrant women’s health, and the intersectionality of food and violence. More specifically, I analyzed the everyday forms of structural vulnerability shaping the experience of transborder migrant women, particularly in terms of food, health, and bodies, and I critiqued interventions to food insecurity and “diet-related diseases” implemented by state and nonprofit agencies. The postdoctoral component of this project expands my field site to more explicitly include both the border and Mexico.

With the second project, “Invisible Bodies: Gender, Health and Exploitation of Migrants in Italy’s South,” I am exploring changes in migrant women’s health status, food security, and approaches to health both by states and NGOs in the context of Europe’s debt crisis and amidst its expanding population of transnational migrants. Political and economic instability are dissuading many migrants from seeking medical attention, health care, political refuge, or social support, yet the effects of increased vulnerability of migrants to chronic health problems in these contexts are not well documented or understood."