Prof. Nancy Neiman has been a Professor of Politics at Scripps College since 1994. She has won numerous teach, scholarship and community service awards. She has taught a wide range of political economy courses including, Markets and Politics in Latin America, the Power Elite: Surveying the Influence of Business over Public Policy, and Infrastructures of Justice. Prof. Neiman teaches a Political Economy of Food course through which she has organized a number of community engagement projects that bridge theory and practice among which are a social enterprise organized with women who were formerly incarcerated, a program called Plant Justice with students at an alternative high school, and a Meatless Monday program that brings students and women who were formerly incarcerated together to share prepare and share meals and food justice programming. She also teaches Napier intergenerational learning courses and Inside-Out courses inside a local prison. Her most recent book, Markets, Community and Just infrastructures, includes a variety of case studies, including an interfaith coffee cooperative in Uganda, Cuban financial reform, globalization in Juárez Mexico, and the US meatpacking industry, to provide a framework for understanding the conditions under which markets promote or undermine social justice.
Focusing on pastoralist women in Gujarat India, the Fulbright-Nehru project of Prof. Neiman intends to track several key coping strategies and practices during Covid-19 among Gujarati pastoralist communities during the pandemic: the struggle over access to grazing lands and the ability to maintain traditional livelihoods, access to healthcare, navigating women’s traditional roles and their role as leaders, and promoting agrarian citizenship. Using qualitative data analysis gathered from interviews and quantitative ARCGIS survey data tracking pastoralist migratory patterns and community welfare, this project hypothesizes that pastoralist identities in Gujarat support, and are supported by, a broader transformational food sovereignty movement.