Jennifer Gaddis

Jennifer E. Gaddis is an assistant professor of Civil Society and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She brings a feminist perspective to food politics through her research on the social, political, and economic organization of public school lunch programs. Her first book, "The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools," is a work of activist scholarship that centers the perspectives of school lunch activists and frontline cafeteria workers who are fighting for food justice in communities across the United States.

Her second book-length project draws on fieldwork in China, Japan, and South Korea to examine how civil society activism, corporate interests, and national policy priorities shape the social justice and ecological goals of government-sponsored school lunch programs.

At UW-Madison, Dr. Gaddis is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies, the Center for Cooperatives, the Center for Child and Family Well-being, and the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems. She serves on the advisory boards for the Havens-Wright Center for Social Justice and the School for Workers and as the faculty advisor for Slow Food UW. She also co-leads two community-based research projects that involve graduate students in the Civil Society and Community Research PhD program.