Lab Director

Joshua Sbicca, Ph.D., is an educator, community builder, and scholar. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Colorado State University. He is the author of Food Justice Now!: Deeping the Roots of Social Struggle and a co-editor of A Recipe for Gentrification: Food, Power, and Resistance in the City. 

Becca Chalit-Hernandez is a PhD Student in the Department of Sociology at Colorado State University. Her research focuses on food systems and carceral systems, as well as discourse and social movements. Through these foci, she has studied migrant farmworker labor organizing, and hunger strikes in immigrant detention. Her current work also includes a study of news coverage of hunger strikes in prisons and detention centers in the United States.

Evan Hazelett is a PhD Student in the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto. He recently capped his Master in Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design with a thesis on nonprofit prison garden programs. After graduating in 2020, he began working for the Berkeley Food Network, first running their on-site pantry, then working as their Research & Advocacy Manager. His current PhD research plans are to study agrifood systems, racial capitalism, and (urban) political ecologies/economies, and hopes to weave in continued study of carceral geography.

Azmal Hossan is a PhD student in Sociology and National Research Trainee in Interdisciplinary Training, Education and Research in Food-Energy-Water Systems at Colorado State University. He studies the human dimensions of global climate change, food-energy-water nexus, and environmental justice. His dissertation researches how climate change and regional political economy are affecting irrigation-based agriculture and generating environmental injustice in Bangladesh. He is also an Agent of Change in Environmental Health Fellow at Milken Institute School of Public Health at The George Washington University and is involved in projects through SESYNC, the Urban Resiliency to Extreme Sustainability Research Network and the Community of Practice program at South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center.  

Julia Kovacs, received her MA from the Department of Sociology at Colorado State University. She works as a freelance social science researcher based in London. Julia helped build this website and the Growing Chains story map. Her research centers environmental justice, green criminology, and social movements.

Kristin Karashinski is an undergraduate student studying Ecosystem Science and Sustainability and an intern with the Geospatial Centroid at Colorado State University. She is passionate about geospatial information systems, cartography, and the power of spatial storytelling, where she has helped support the development of the Growing Chains story map.