Natasha Fernandez-Preston is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley’s Department of Anthropology. Prior to her doctoral studies, Natasha completed her undergraduate degree in anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. Her undergraduate project studied the archaeological dimensions of food and colonialism in Puerto Rico, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Specifically, she used archival research and phytolith analysis to approach food practices.
Currently, her dissertation project focuses ethnographic and historical attention to foodways and food practices in Puerto Rico in the twentieth and twenty-first century, to understand their relationship to state and corporate governance, food vulnerability, and possibilities of sovereignty and freedom in neoliberal capitalist and colonial contexts. She is using the lens of contemporary archaeology to frame spatial-temporal and human-material relationships. Methodologically, she is using archival research, landscape mapping, and participant observation to approach food practices throughout time and space. Her broader research interests explore more broadly how food and its ecological and social relationships can be used as a source of transformation for the shaping of decolonized and just global futures.
