Joeva Sean Rock, an outstanding instructor in international development who researches agricultural biotechnology, food sovereignty, and environmental governance, has joined the Blum Center’s Global Poverty & Practice program as Lecturer.
Rock, who has served as Professorial Lecturer in the Health Inequity and Care Program in the Department of Anthropology at American University, has taught courses on globalization, social movements, and political-economic determinants of health. She earned a BA in International Studies/Political Science from UC San Diego and a MA and PhD in Anthropology from American University. She has served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University.
Rock’s research has been funded by the Fulbright-Hays Program and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and featured in African Affairs; Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment; Global Bioethics; The Nation; Popula; and Foreign Policy in Focus. She has served as a contributor to Africa Is a Country, where she writes on issues related to development, agriculture, and social change.
Her current book project is We Are Not Starving: the Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Ghana, “an ethnography of Ghanaian activists, farmers, scientists and officials embroiled in intense debates over agricultural futures, national development and political sovereignty,” according to Rock’s website.
Among Rock’s areas of expertise is online learning, a boon for UC Berkeley, as the campus enters its first full semester of virtual learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’m thrilled to be joining a program that takes a critical lens to poverty and development practice,” said Rock. “As inequalities continue to widen in the U.S. and around the globe, we need more than ever students and practitioners who are committed to building different, more equitable worlds. GPP 115 seeks to do just that, and equips students with interdisciplinary skills in asking deep questions, analyzing structures of inequality, and imagining alternatives.”
