Kristin Reynolds

Dr. Reynolds is Chair of Food Studies in the Schools of Public Engagement at The New School. As a critical geographer, her scholarship centers questions of power, scale, spatiality, and social justice. Her work is grounded in a critical/participatory action research approach that envisions research as a tool to inform more racial and economic equitable food systems, in urban and rural settings, in the United States and internationally.

Reynolds’ research has focused on urban agriculture in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, and Paris; semences paysannes (heritage grains) and food sovereignty in eastern France; and inequities experienced by immigrant and racialized farmworkers in southern France. Her first book Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City (2016, University of Georgia Press, coauthored with Nevin Cohen) examined strategies that urban agriculture leaders use to challenge systemic racial, economic, and gender inequities, and how public scholarship can contribute to these initiatives. Reynolds is currently working on her second book, Radical Food Geographies (coedited with Colleen Hammelman and Charles Levkoe), forthcoming from Bristol University Press in 2024. 

Dr. Reynolds taught courses on social justice in the food system at Yale School of the Environment from 2013-22. Now an affiliated faculty at Yale Center for Environmental Justice, she collaborates on initiatives focused on food security, food sovereignty, engaged research, and experiential learning, in-line with the Center’s priority areas.