FLPC Welcomes Visiting Scholar Alana Mann

Dr. Alana Mann is Senior Lecturer and Chair of the Department of Media and Communications in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is a key researcher in the Sydney Environment Institute, an interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences center, and leads the Sydney Policy Lab Participatory Food Planning Project which aims to inform the development of resilient and inclusive local food economies in the City of Sydney and beyond.

Alana is keen to use her time at FLPC to research how local food policies operate in the US, and particularly to understand the role individuals and communities can play in their co-creation.

Her Ph.D., completed in 2012 following a career in the media, addressed the political economy of food systems with a strong focus on the discursive struggles between civil society actors, governments, and corporations regarding the solutions to hunger and malnutrition. Published as Global Activism in Food Politics: Power Shift (Palgrave, 2014) this work explores the dynamics of small-scale farmers’ movements campaigning for food sovereignty in Third Wave Democracies including Chile and Mexico.

A forthcoming book titled Resisting Corporate Capture presents cases of transformative ethical practice, pedagogy, and policy that offer alternatives to the industrial or ‘conventional’ food system in countries including Cuba, where she has recently visited urban and rural farms.

Alana has presented her research at institutions including Chiang Mai University in Thailand, Aarhus University in Denmark, and the Universities of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru (JNU) in India. She has worked as a consultant and media advisor for the Food First Information and Action Network (FIAN International) in Heidelberg, Germany, and served on the Executive Committee of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) for two years. In 2017, she was a member of the committee to appoint an Australasian representative to the Civil Society Mechanism of the World Committee for Food Security at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).