Maggie Dickinson

Maggie Dickinson’s (PhD CUNY Graduate Center, 2015) research focuses on urban food systems, food and welfare policy, the role of food in social movements, social reproduction, and the ways racism, gendered care, and exploitative labor systems produce food insecurity. Much of her research asks why food assistance has become the leading edge of our response to poverty in the 21^st Century U.S. Her book Feeding the Crisis: Care and Abandonment in America’s Food Safety Net (University of California Press, 2020) won an honorable mention for the 2020-21 Delmos Jones and Jagna Sharff Memorial Book Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of North America. Recent publications include her research on food insecurity among CUNY students. As a researcher, she prioritizes accessible, engaged academic writing that can influence policy and public debates.  In that vein, she written about her research on food stamps, welfare policy, and food and the Green New Deal in The Atlantic, The Hill, Civil Eats, and The Huffington Post, in addition to numerous academic articles and book chapters. Her newest research project looks at the integration of retail grocery stores with larger structures of policing.

Dickinson serves as the advisor for the Cities and Social Medicine minor and the 4+1 accelerated masters degree program in collaboration with the CUNY School of Public Health. She is also a faculty fellow at the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute. She teaches Cities and Social Medicine and Urban Food Systems.

Office: Powdermaker 250M

Email: Maggie.dickinson@qc.cuny.edu