As part of the Sustainable Futures Speaker Series, Dr. Seth Holmes, along with Triqui-Mexican farmworker collaborators, will present “Migrant Farmworkers and Our Food System: Inequalities, Health, and What’s Gone Wrong.”

Seth M. Holmes is Associate Professor in Medical Anthropology and Public Health at UC Berkeley and attending physician at Highland Hospital in Oakland. He is Chair of Medical Anthropology, Co-Director of the MD/PhD Track in Medical Anthropology coordinated between UCSF and UC Berkeley, and Co-Chair of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine.

His research focuses on social hierarchies, health, health care and the naturalization and normalization of difference and inequality in the context of US-Mexico im/migration and our transnational food system. For this research, he spent one year and half full-time migrating with Triqui native Mexican farmworkers, several of whom will be presenting with Dr. Holmes, living in labor camps and picking strawberries in Washington and Oregon, living in a slum apartment and pruning vineyards in California, living in a village in the mountains of southern Mexico while harvesting and planting corn, and crossing the border desert on foot into Arizona.

The book from this work, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies (UC Press 2013), received the New Millennium Book Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology, the Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Award, the Association for Humanist Sociology Book Award, and the James M. Blaut Award from the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers. 

The Sustainable Futures Speaker Series is presented by the Environment & Community Graduate Program and the Schatz Energy Research Center.

The presentation will take place Thursday, February 16, at 5:30 p.m. in Founders Hall 118 on the HSU campus.