User:Theboogeyman01/Monica White

Monica White is an African American Activist, professor, and environmental sociologist. White is an assistant professor of Environmental Justice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a joint appointment in the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology. She has also worked as a post doctoral fellow at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. In addition to her academic work, she is the past President of the Board of Directors of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN), and has served on the advisory board of SAAFON (Southeast African American Farmers Organic Network). Active in the food justice movement for over a decade, especially active in Detroit with the DBCFSN, her work in the classroom and community embodies the theoretical framework of Collective Agency and Community Resilience and the use of community-based food systems and agriculture as a strategy of community development.

Early Years
White was born in Maine, as her father was a professor at the University of Maine. However, her family moved to Detroit when White was young. It was here in Detroit where White's father would receive his doctorate at Wayne State University, Michigan's third largest university behind the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Michigan State University in Lansing. According to White "My entire life,” she says, “everyone in my family grew food.” Her dad had a backyard garden, her sister grew corn and other produce and her grandmother raised tomatoes and other food indoors."

Education and Research
For undergrad, White attended Oakland University in Auburn Hills. Following, her undergraduate studies White got her masters and PhD in Sociology from Western Michigan University. Furthermore, White's research is very much inspired by the various connections between race, class, food systems, community development, urban geography/planning, and social movement literatures. Additionally, White's research examines how Residents in her home city of Detroit, Michigan participate in community gardening to reaffirm their environmental connections, rejecting reliance on external political systems, and revitalizing and re-visioning the city of Detroit from the ground up.

White's research investigates Black, Latinx and Indigenous grassroots organizations that are engaged in the development of sustainable, community food systems as a strategy to respond to issues of hunger and food inaccessibility. Furthermore, According to Kimberle Crenshaw, a professor at Columbia Law School, intersectionality refers to the double discrimination of racism and sexism faced by Black women, critiquing the "single-axis framework that is dominant in anti-discrimination law.. feminist theory and anti-racist politics" for its focus on the experiences of the most privileged members of subordinate groups. White's work in focusing on Black women’s urban gardening, encompasses Crenshaw's theory as she investigates how women of color use agriculture as a way to combat many types of oppression