Associate Professor

About

  • Website

    http://joshuasbicca.com

  • Role

    Faculty

  • Position

    • Associate Professor
    • Associate Chair
    • Director of Prison Agriculture Lab

  • Concentration

    • Food and Agriculture
    • Political Economy
    • Race and Ethnic Studies
    • Social Movements
    • Urban Studies
    • Prisons

  • Department

    • Sociology

  • Education

    • Ph.D., University of Florida

Biography

Joshua Sbicca is Associate Professor of Sociology at Colorado State University. He is the Director of the Prison Agriculture Lab. His research focuses on food and agriculture as sites of economic, political, and social struggle. His recent work studies food systems, food cultures, and social movements within contexts like prison, gentrification, and racial capitalism. Underlying these interests is an ongoing engagement with how activists and scholars articulate and practice autonomy and freedom and what this means for building broad based social movements.

His focus on food is a lens to address a range of sociological questions around social change, political economy, urbanization, social hierarchies, human/nature relations, punishment, and power.

He is the author of Food Justice Now!: Deepening the Roots of  Social Struggle (2018, University of Minnesota Press). He is the co-editor alongside Alison Alkon and Yuki Kato of A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City (2020, New York University Press, Edited Volume Honorable Mention-Association for the Study of Food and Society). He also co-edited a special double issue alongside Ashanté Reese in Food and Foodways called Food and Carcerality: From Confinement to Abolition.

His research has appeared in journals such as Agriculture and Human Values, Antipode, Critical Sociology, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Environmental Sociology, Geoforum, Journal of Rural Studies, Social Movement Studies, and Society and Natural Resources. 

Publications

Chennault, C. and J. Sbicca. 2024. “Abolition Methodologies.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 43(1): 157-180. Access article.

Chennault, C., and J. Sbicca. 2023. “Prison agriculture in the United States: Racial capitalism and the disciplinary matrix of exploitation and rehabilitation.” Agriculture and Human Values. 40(1): 175-191. Access article.

Reese, A.M. and J. Sbicca. 2022. “Food and carcerality: From confinement to abolition.” Food and Foodways. 30(1-2): 1-15. Access article.

Sbicca, J., LA. Minkoff-Zern, and S. Coopwood. 2021. ““Because they are connected”: Linking structural inequalities in farmworker organizing.” Human Geography. 13(3): 263-276. Access article.

Luxton, I. and J. Sbicca. 2021. “Mapping Movements: A Call for Qualitative Social Network Analysis.” Qualitative Research. 21(2): 161-180. Access article.

Sbicca, J., I. Luxton, J. Hale, and K. Roeser. 2019. “Collaborative Concession in Food Movement Networks: The Uneven Relations of Resource Mobilization.” Sustainability. 11(10): 2881. Access article.

Shisler, R. and J. Sbicca. 2019. “Agriculture as Carework: The Contradictions of Performing Femininity in a Male-Dominated Occupation.” Society and Natural Resources. 32(8): 875-892. Access article.

Sbicca, J. 2019. “Urban Agriculture, Revalorization, and Green Gentrification in Denver, Colorado.” Research in Political Sociology. 26: 143-164. Access article.

Sbicca, J and J.S. Myers. 2016. “Food Justice Racial Projects: Fighting Racial Neoliberalism from the Bay to the Big Apple.” Environmental Sociology. 3(1): 30-41 Access article.

Sbicca, J. 2016. “These Bars Can’t Hold Us Back: Plowing Incarcerated Geographies with Restorative Food Justice.” Antipode. 48(5): 1359-1379 . Access article

Sbicca, J. 2015. “Solidarity and Sweat Equity: For Reciprocal Food Justice Research.” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development. 5(4): 1-5. Access article

Sbicca, J. 2015. “Farming while confronting the other: The production and maintenance of boundaries in the borderlands.” Journal of Rural Studies. 39: 1-10. Access article

Myers, J.S. and J. Sbicca. 2015. “Bridging good food and good jobs: From secession to confrontation within alternative food movement politics.” Geoforum. 61: 17-26. Access article

Sbicca, J. 2015. “Food Labor, Economic Inequality and the Imperfect Politics of Process in the Alternative Food Movement.” Agriculture and Human Values. 32(4): 675-687. Access article

Courses

  • SOC 105: Social Problems

  • SOC 324: Food Justice

  • SOC 364: Food, Agriculture and Global Society

  • SOC 374: Social Movements and Collective Behavior

  • SOC 562: Sociology of Food Systems and Agriculture