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Amplifier Student Mini-Grants


Photograph by Maureen Kobierowski, ASU Humanities Lab.

FoodPod: Decolonizing the Arizona Diet

Lab: Food, Health and Climate Change, Fall 2021
Instructors: Joni Adamson, Rimjhim Aggarwal
Type: Podcast
Tags: Food, Sustainability, Indigenous, Culture
Team: Alma Varon, Samantha Esparza Alcantara, Chloé Billingsley, Marcelo Lomelin


Learn more about this Lab


About the outcome

Industrial food production is destructive and unsustainable. By interviewing local growers, dispeling myths about seasonality, and highlighting Indigenous traditions and foodways, this podcast will help the community understand how human beings, food production, and the planet are all part of a single biosphere.


About the team

Alma Varon is a first year MA Student in English with a concentration in literature. She graduated from ASU with a degree in English with a concentration in literature. She has minors in Violin Performance and Spanish. Her area of interest is the environmental humanities, specifically looking as to how literature plays a role in our environmental understanding and action. She has recently become interested in how we can use concepts of biopower and biopolitical life to understand cultural systems and how this can also help us initiate and advocate for the environmental humanities.

Samantha Esparza Alcantara is a Sophomore pursuing a BA in Sustainability with certifications in Sustainable Food Systems and Brazilian Studies. All her life, she has been in an environment which heavily links food with tradition and family. It made food a significant part of her personality, life, and identity even when away from home. Now in college, she is interested in learning more about the larger forces that influence and makes our current food system and how they impact, both positively and negatively, the environment, societies, and the economy. The region that she would like to focus on is the Latin American region. 

Chloé Billingsley is a fourth-year undergraduate student, studying for a Bachelor of Science in Sustainability with a minor in business. Her main areas of interest are CSR, sustainable resource management and sustainable food systems. Through her research on Food, Health and Climate Change she hopes to develop an educational podcast that empowers Arizona residents to make more informed food decisions!

My name is Marcelo Lomelin. I am from Los Angeles and am working towards my masters degree in Justice Studies. My blood and ancestors come from Mexico, my family cherishes food, love and family. Cultivating connections to food, sustainability, place, history and how these can inspire future food relationships, underpins my current studies.


View other mini-grants

Race and Disability

Lab: Deconstructing Race
Type: Video
Team: Margaret Sarbacker, Mellissa Richardson Hall, Riley Forman

Racial Stereotyping in Video Games

Lab: Deconstructing Race
Type: Event
Team: David Jaulus, Anthony Rosas, Edwin Wong, Claire Hetrick

Immigrant Households and Barriers to Vaccination

Lab: Epidemic Emergences
Type: Campaign
Team: Jhanz Marco Garcia, Cyrus Eapen, Anthony Un, Darwin Cruz