As TLU's premier academic event, this year's Krost Symposium, "Everything is Bigger in Texas: Even Hunger, will take a deep dive into food insecurity and how it impacts various populations on and off campus.
Wednesday, October 18
10 a.m. Chapel
1 - 2:15 p.m. | Researching Food Insecurity | Dunne Conference Center (Tschoepe Hall)
A 75-minute facilitated workshop with student-researchers and student leaders featuring:
Andy Crow (they/them) is a scholar working at the intersection of food history, labor studies, and seventeenth-century English literature. Their book Austerity Measures: The Poetics of Food Insecurity in Early Modern Literature (forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press) uncovers how poets used verse form to alter how their readers understood food ethics. Austerity Measures simultaneously makes a larger intervention into how we read poetry now, calling us to understand literary form as a force for social change.
Andy's research is informed by their experience as a lead organizer in the historic Columbia graduate worker unionization campaign, which restored union rights to thousands of graduate students across the country.
While Andy continues to teach and produce scholarship, they have pivoted their career to focus full-time on workers' rights. They left their tenure-track professorship job to become a labor lawyer, and are currently a J.D. candidate at NYU Law. Interested in reading some of their work?
Check out these pieces: “THOMAS TRYON’S HARMLESS COCOE-NUT WATER” and “Touching Tusser.”
Dr. Lisa Henry, professor of Anthropology at the University of North Texas
Lisa Henry is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Texas. As an applied medical anthropologist, her research interests include food insecurity, globalization and health, indigenous healing systems, biomedicine and healthcare delivery, and anthropology in public health.
She recently completed a collaborative project funded by the North Texas Food Bank investigating factors that influence food security in North Texas. She is currently investigating food insecurity among college students for the Dean of Students at UNT.
Her 2020 book with Palgrave, "Experiences of Hunger and Food Insecurity in College” and her work with the North Texas Food Bank, as well as her ongoing work on food insecurity on UNT’s campus are exactly the reason we invited Dr. Henry to TLU.
Interested in reading some of her newest work? Check out her co-authored piece called, “Experiences of food insecurity among LGBTQIA+ college students in North Texas."
7 p.m. | Giesber Keynote Speaker | Jackson Auditorium
Dr. Ashanté M. Reese, “The Conditions for Nourishment: Notes on Food Justice, Delight, and the Black Radical Imagination”
A writer, anthropologist, and associate professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Reese's talk will draw from previous ethnographic research conducted in Washington, D.C., new research on prison agriculture, and lessons learned from community-based organizations to offer insights into how to create equitable food systems. Specifically, this talk moves beyond the biological imperative of access to healthy food to explore the social and cultural significance of creating meals and eating as one way to explore how we should embrace delight and imagination as core tenets of creating more just food futures.
Dr. Reese works at the intersection of critical food studies and Black geographies, examining the ways Black people produce and navigate food-related spaces. Animated by the question, who and what survives?, Dr. Reese’s work has focused on the everyday strategies Black people employ while navigating inequity. Her first book, Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C., takes up these themes through an ethnographic exploration of anti-blackness and food access.
Black Food Geographies won the 2020 Best Monograph Award from the Association for the Study of Food and Society and 2020 Margaret Mead Award jointly awarded by the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology. Her second book, "Black Food Matters Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice", is a collection co-edited with Hanna Garth that explores the geographic, social, and cultural dimensions of food in Black life across the U.S. Currently, Dr. Reese is working on a cultural history of sugar and Sugar Land, Texas in which she explores the spatial, economic, and carceral implications of sugar and the sometimes contradictory and deadly sweetness that marks Black life.
The Krost Symposium committee is excited to bring Dr. Reese to campus for numerous reasons, including her connections to San Antonio and Austin, her award-winning publications, and her new project on "a cultural history of sugar and Sugar Land, Texas." As TLU serves an increasingly racial and ethnically-diverse student population, the members of this year’s Krost thought it important to bring a keynote speaker who could speak to the issues of food access, food-justice, and how spaces of hunger affect people of color.
Thursday, October 19
9:30-10:20 a.m. | Panel on College Food Insecurity | Wupperman Little Theatre (Schuech Fine Arts)
Featuring Dr. Lisa Henry and:
Dr. Kathleen Gilbert, director of Sam Houston State University Food Pantry
Kathleen Gilbert currently serves as director of the Food Pantry at Sam Houston State University. In August 2021 she received her Ed. D. in Higher Education Leadership from Sam Houston State, completing her dissertation entitled, College Student Perspectives of Food Insecurity During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Photo-Elicitation Narrative Inquiry.
Kathleen was awarded the Staff Excellence and Keys of Excellence Awards during the 2020-2021 academic year for her work and service to the university. Kathleen actively serves on the Houston Food Bank Partner Advisory Committee for the university and surrounding communities.
Interested in hearing a bit from her TEDtalk? Watch The Intersecting Identities of College Food Insecurity.
Shannon Que, Abilene ISD social worker
Shannon Que is the program director of Youth Voice, a teen drop-in center located in Abilene, Texas focussed on meeting the basic and holistic needs of vulnerable students. Having obtained her bachelor's and master's of Social Work from Abilene Christian University, Shannon continues the food insecurity work and research she began in her undergraduate studies.
In addition to working at Youth Voice, Shannon serves as the Chair for the Abilene Big Country Hunger Coalition, working with local entities to address food insecurity and hunger in Abilene.
Shannon is also the co-founder of Carry-Out Community, an initiative aimed at addressing food insecurity amongst college students by networking with various departments and organizations to provide nutrition education, immediate access to food, and connection to continued support in a low-barrier manner. Interested in hearing more from her?
Check out her TEDx Talk, "Textbooks or dinner? Food insecurity on campuses."
10:30-11:20 a.m. | Mapping Texas Hunger | Wupperman Little Theatre (Schuech Fine Arts)
Eric Cooper, CEO of San Antonio Food Bank
Through his dual strategies of feeding the line and shortening the line, Cooper has received national recognition. It is this holistic approach to serving the entire community that has garnered community support while delivering measurable impact.
12 p.m. | Lunch Workshop: Building & Sustaining a College Food Pantry | Suehs Room (Hein Dining Hall)
Featuring Dr. Kathleen Gilbert & Shannon Que