By Yuchen Zhao Recent years have seen a revival of interest in the relationship between sites related to food production, distribution, and consumption and the social interaction within these locations in racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods. Food has figured prominently in the racialized public realm and the problems with migrants...

By Misria Shaik Ali, PhD In 2016, farmer K. Ramanjaneyulu from MC Palle village in Andhra Pradesh, India, observed that the water in his agricultural borewell had turned white. Gangi Reddy, another farmer from MC Palle, observed the same in his farm and tasted the water. “It tasted salty,” he...

By Ying Wang, UW-Milwaukee Associate Professor of Art History "Are these cinders?" I asked my Tibetan teacher while staring at a smoking charcoal-like slag pile. "No. They are the remains of a burnt sheep-dung fuel, for fire, used instead of firewood," my teacher answered. When his sister-in-law pushed the fuel...

By Randolph Marcum On April 14th, the Center for 21st Century Studies proudly hosted Arboreal Humanities: A Roundtable Conversation. Featuring Richard Grusin (a professor of Media, Cinema, and Digital Studies at UW-Milwaukee), Meg Wilson (a Ph.D. student in art history at UW-Madison), and Mishiikenh Vernon Altiman (UW-Milwaukee’s Elder in Residence...

By Katherine Riebe, Alexandria Sedar, and Linda Xiong The sun has yet to rise, and water is boiling to prepare guayusa1 tea. Generations of family sit side by side, drinking their tea, recounting their dreams, and preparing for the day ahead. In the twilight hours, the family leaves to tend...

By Rebecca Dudley, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology and Graduate Fellow with American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis For the publication of this short essay, permission from the farmer central to this story has been ascertained, though all persons and place names remain pseudonyms.  I pull into Mr. Dan Leonard’s...

By Matt Simmons, Assistant Professor of History at Emmanuel College Among those most affected by the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression were the landless farmers of the American South, particularly tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the Arkansas Delta and surrounding region. The post-Civil War rural South was known for...

By Laura D. Gelfand, Professor of Art History at Utah State University Fairy tales are meant to impart lessons about morality, but they are not trustworthy sources of information about the natural world. Yet, most of us learn what little we know about wolves from sources as untrustworthy as fairy...

By Jennifer Morales Though the January 6, 2021, domestic coup attempt against the US government appeared shocking, in retrospect, it is easy to trace the buildup to that brutal effort. From the outgoing president’s relentless prefiguring of a “stolen” election, to the cacophony of conspiracy theories about election safety on...

By Sandra Morais Cooking with Gas Stoves in the 1930s Lisbon1 Human practices of energy consumption transform and are transformed by social structuresi, an idea that embraces cooking as a social practice with profound implications on energy use. However, energy transitions are not made without appropriate converters, which was well understood...