Our Faculty

Background

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. Previous to this work, Ramírez has also engaged in ethnographic and linguistic research with Indigenous Kichwa populations in the Ecuadorian Amazon and with a Hmong messianic religious group in Northeastern Thailand.

Ramírez’s work can be found in the National Social Science Journal, Anthropology News, Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials, and in a co-authored chapter of Quechua Expressions of Stance and Deixis. Currently, along with other amazing food justice scholars, their work in the urban agriculture movement in San Diego-Tijuana is highlighted in the forthcoming volume Nurturing Food Justice (an updated companion to the well-known Cultivating Food Justice), edited by Alison Alkon and Julian Agyeman. Belinda’s community work is also highlighted in public spaces such as the Edible San Diegomagazine and Living Local podcast, Slow Food Urban San Diego blog, David Palumbo-Liu’s Speaking Out of Place podcast, San Diego Food System Alliance blog, and Nan Sterman’s KPBS show A Growing Passion. You can also learn more about Belinda’s work in this StoryMap.

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.

Select Publications

• Book chapter in peer review: for edited volume Nurturing Food Justice, edited by Alison Hope Alkon and Julian Agyeman; “No Justice Without Land: The Struggle for Autonomy in the San Diego Urban Agriculture Movement”
• 2021. “A Collection that Grows: Food Justice and Food Security in Public and Academic Libraries.” Conference presentation proceeding for the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials Virtual Conference, co-authored with Destiny Rivera.
• 2015. Nuckolls, Janis B., Tod D. Swanson, and Belinda Ramirez Spencer. “Demonstrative Deixis in Two Dialects of Amazonian Quichua.” In Quechua Expressions of Stance and Deixis, edited by Marilyn S. Manley and Antje G. Muntendam, ch. 3. Vol. 11 of Brill’s Studies in the Indigenous Languages of the Americas. The Netherlands: Brill.

2014. “An Issue of Legitimacy: Hmong Religious and Ethnonational Borders in Northern Thailand.” National Social Science Journal, 42(1): 96-104. 

Education

• PhD, Sociocultural Anthropology, University of California San Diego
• MA, Sociocultural Anthropology, University of California San Diego
• BA, Sociocultural Anthropology, Brigham Young University

Research Interests

• Urban agriculture
• Food justice and sovereignty movements
• Environmental ethics
• Community-based research
• Political economy/ecology

Teaching Interests

• Food justice and sovereignty
• Race/ethnicity and racisms
• Environmental and climate justice
• Food-climate-health nexus
• Ethnographic methods

Awards

• 2020-2021, University of California President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship - “Cultivating a Community of Ethical Subjects: An Exploration of Values, Race, and Politics in the San Diego-Tijuana Urban Agriculture Movement”
• 2019, UC Santa Barbara Blum Center Research Grant on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy
• 2018-2019, UC San Diego Chancellor’s Interdisciplinary Collaboratories Fellowship
• 2018, UC San Diego Chancellor’s Research Excellence Scholarships (CRES) Award - “From Food Deserts to Food Forests: The Case for Urban Agriculture in San Diego County”
• 2018, University of California Global Food Initiative Student Ambassador

More Info

• LinkedIn