I’ll be meeting with Dr. Rachel Vaughn’s class, Society and Genetics, at UCLA.

Dr. Rachel Vaughn is a Lecturer in the UCLA Institute for Society & Genetics and the Oral Historian in Residence in the UCLA Center for the Study of Women.  Her research engages the intersections of Food Politics, Discard Studies, Feminist Environmentalism, Science & Technology Studies. She is the author of ‘Choosing Wisely’: Paralleling Food Sovereignty and Reproductive Justice” (Frontiers); and is co-author, editor and organizer of Edible Feminisms: On Discard, Waste & Metabolism a UCLA Luskin Endowment for Thought grant-funded conference turned special issue of the multi-disciplinary journal Food, Culture & Society. Vaughn’s forthcoming book is Talking Food, Talking Trash: Oral Histories of Food Precarity from the Margins of a Dumpster (under contract, University of Nebraska Press). She is author of a second manuscript-in-progress Queer Toxic Soy: Gendered Food Fear Mongering on the intertwined racial and gender dynamics of pop culture fear and scientific exploration of the effects of soy phytoestrogens, particularly for cisgender male consumers. She teaches interdisciplinary courses such as: Biotechnology & Society;  Race, Class & Gender in Food Science & Technology; Health, Sanitation & The Body; Feminist & Queer Ecologies; and Sanitary Imperialisms.

Dr. Vaughn’s class, Problems of Identity at Biology/Society Interface, is an exploration of problems of human identity that are inherently biological and social. Students will explore this topic through the course theme Waste, Environmental Exposures & the Body, examining a variety of cross-disciplinary perspectives in biological and human sciences connected to one of the most complex conundrums of our time: waste.