Stephen Acabado

Stephen Acabado is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. His archaeological investigations in Ifugao, northern Philippines, have established the recent origins of the Cordillera Rice Terraces, which were once known to be at least 2,000 years old. Dr. Acabado directs the Bicol and Ifugao Archaeological Projects and co-directs the Taiwan Indigenous Landscape and History Project.  He is a strong advocate of an engaged archaeology where descendant communities are involved in the research process.

Website: https://www.stephen-acabado.com/

Nicolo Paolo Ludovice

Nicolo Ludovice is currently a lecturer at the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong, and at the Health Sciences Program of the Ateneo de Manila University. He recently completed his PhD in History from HKU. His research interests broadly cover animal history, the history of science, technology, and medicine including biomedicine, public health, and zoonoses, and histories of food and foodways, with the Philippines as his geographical focus. His PhD thesis investigated the history of animals in medicine and health in the nineteenth- and the twentieth-century Philippines. He has taught courses on the global histories of animals, food and empire, Philippine history, and digital games. Some of his works can be found at Society & Animals, Global Food History, and East Asian Science and Technology Studies.

Website: http://nludovice.com

Anthony Medrano

Anthony Medrano is Assistant Professor of Social Science (Environmental Studies) and the National University of Singapore (NUS) Presidential Young Professor of Environmental Studies at Yale-NUS College. He also holds an appointment in the Inter-Asia Engagements Cluster at the Asia Research Institute. His research examines the history and legacy of human interactions with marine environments in South and Southeast Asia. His book manuscript, The Edible Ocean: Science, Industry, and the Rise of Urban Southeast Asia, is under contract with Yale University Press. Asst Prof. Medrano’s forthcoming article titled “History between the Tides: How Estuaries and Migrants Transformed the Straits of Melaka, 1870s-1940s” will soon appear in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (2020). Prior to joining Yale-NUS College, he was a Ziff Environmental Fellow at Harvard University, where he held affiliations with the Departments of History and South Asian Studies, the Harvest University Center for the Environment and the Joint Center for History and Economics. He has a PhD in History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His next book project seeks to rethink a history of Southeast Asia in the long twentieth century as a history of alien fishes and biodiversity changes.

Website: https://www.yale-nus.edu.sg/faculty/anthony-medrano/

Lynne Milgram

Lynne Milgram is Professor Emerita and Adjunct Professor (Anthropology) at OCAD University, Toronto, Canada. Her research on gender and development in the northern Philippines analyzes the cultural politics of social change regarding microfinance and women’s work in handicrafts and in the Philippine-Hong Kong used clothing trade. Milgram’s ongoing research in Benguet province investigates transformations of urban public space and issues of informality and extralegality with regard to street vending, public marketplace redevelopment, and food provisioning systems. Milgram’s current grant funded research analyzes emergent entrepreneurial initiatives in the northern Philippines’ Arabica coffee industry and in organic farming practice as well as in women’s use of information and communication technology to market their crafts. Milgram has published this research in referred journals and in edited volumes. A sample co-edited book is: (2013) (with K.T. Hansen and W. E. Little) Street Economies in the Urban Global South. Two recent publications on food studies include: (2021) ‘Social Entrepreneurship and Arabica Coffee Production in the Northern Philippines: Navigating Opportunities and Constraints.’ Human Organization 80(1): 72-82; and (2021) (with L. Mendoza). Repositioning the Edge: A Wholesale Vegetable Market in Benguet Northern Philippines. IN Norms and Illegality: Intimate Ethnographies and Politics. Eds., C. Panella and W. E. Little. Pp.137-160. Lexington Books.

Website: https://www2.ocadu.ca/bio/b-lynne-milgram

Melanie Narciso

Melanie Narciso is a nutritionist by training with Bachelors and Masters degrees from the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB) and University of Wisconsin-Stout, respectively. Ms. Narciso joined the Institute of Human Nutrition and Food at UPLB initially as a rice researcher and later as faculty member. She is presently a doctoral candidate of Anthropology at the University of Georgia Athens. Having great interest in reconnecting people with their food, specifically in re-sensitizing tastes to what is good for humans and their ecologies, she is studying the intersections of food, sensory memory and place. She is now writing her dissertation which explores how rice agricultural modernization affects the continuity and change of buru, a fermented fish tradition in Candaba, Philippines. She studies the memories and senses embedded in this agricultural landscape and their role in shaping the fermented tradition. After graduation, she wishes to go full time advocating for sustainable diets and gastronomy, researching and promoting these through place-based nutrition, biocultural diversity, taste and memory.

Website: https://anthropology.uga.edu/directory/people/melanie-narciso

Kaitlin Rizarri

Kaitlin Rizarri is a Filipina (Visayan), reconnecting Mi’kmaw (Ktaqmuk) and mixed European medicine grower raised by Lands and waters of Treaty 19 territory (known as Caledon), and Tkaronto/Toronto. She is an MA student in Adult Education and Community Development at the University of Toronto, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Her scholarly work follows suit, in which she is researching Filipino food sovereignty, medicine growing in Tkaronto, and solidarity amongst BIPOC communities.

Clarissa Ruzol

Clarissa Ruzol is a PhD Anthropology student at the London School of Economics. They are trained in anthropology and environmental science with interests in human-environment entanglements, anthropology of the state, bureaucracy, and infrastructures, and the use of a mixed-methods approach. They had previously taught anthropology courses and did several research with the College of Forestry and Natural Resources in the University of the Philippines Los Baños. Their publications appear in Environmental Science & Policy, Global Environmental Change, Habitat International, Climate Risk Management, Journal of Environmental Science and Management, Philippine Agricultural Scientist, and Springer. They are currently on fieldwork in the Philippines with the government technobureaucrats implementing the contested New Centennial Water Source- Kaliwa Dam Project. Cla is vegan and likes to conjure up meals for anyone who wants a share.