Lois Stanford
Department Head; Professor
Regular Faculty, Department Head
Contact Info
575-646-6092
Breland Hall 306
Expertise:
Cultural Anthropology, Food Studies, Anthropology
Biography
Dr. Stanford is a cultural anthropologist who focuses on agricultural anthropology, globalization, food studies, and community development in Mexico and New Mexico. Click here to see a video recording of Dr. Stanford’s talk about the social history of avocados at the FUZE.SW Food and Folklore Festival held in Santa Fe in September 2014.
Current Research
Dr. Lois Stanford is an agricultural anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology at New Mexico State University. Her research focuses on the globalization and restructuring of local and export foods systems and the subsequent impact on small growers in these systems, both in Mexico and in the US Southwest.
In Mexico, she has authored, The Avocado’s Tale: Binational Integration of the Avocado Industries of Michoacán and California (forthcoming, Cornell University Press). Currently, she is working with colleagues, Kirsten Appendini (El Colegio de Mexico) and Guadalupe Rodriguez Gomez (CIESAS-Occidente) on a book, Los sistemas agroalimentarios en la América del Norte globalizada: Seguridad alimentaria y calidad de los alimentos. Drs. Appendini, Gomez, and Stanford are finishing a book manuscript of the same name. Her new project, Purhépecha Foodways in Michoacán, Mexico: the Social Embeddedness of Food Production, Processing, and Distribution, focuses on the persistence of traditional foodways, conservation of biological diversity of indigenous food plants, and linkages between traditional foodways and indigenous identity. She is currently working on a collaborative research grant proposal with colleagues from the Facultad de Agrobiología, Universidad Michoacanade San Nicolás de Hidalgo,
In New Mexico, Lois Stanford has conducted research on the chile industry and alternative food markets and CSAs in New Mexico. She serves as the graduate advisor for the food studies minor in anthropology and the undergraduate advisor for the supplementary major in sustainable development. She also serves as a core member and newsletter editor for Mysterious Horizons, a local CSA-based in the Mesilla Valley, New Mexico.
