Overview
This event is part of the Center for Ethics and Human Values' 2025-26 COMPAS Program on the theme of Food.
Further details TBA.
Panelists
Shoshanah Inwood (Ohio State, School of Environment and Natural Resources)
Shoshanah Inwood is a rural sociologist and an associate professor in SENR. She holds degrees in rural sociology, environmental science and biology. Her career has focused on the intersection of agriculture, environment, and society in the context of community and economic development. Shoshanah has maintained a dual focus studying both the role of communities in food system development and the socio-cultural household level processes that underlay the American food and agriculture system. Her integrated research and extension program centers on: 1) Health and well-being in the food and agriculture sector, 2) Social factors affecting farm growth, 3) Community and economic development through food and agriculture, and 4) Food System Resilience, Disasters and Disruptions. These themes tie together through questions examining social sustainability in the food and agriculture sector and focus on people, place and community. She approaches these questions through a sociological lens and utilize a mixed methods approach integrating qualitative and quantitative data collection methods and analysis techniques. She co-directs the Center for Community and Working Landscapes on the Wooster Campus at The Ohio State University.
Bart Elmore (Ohio State, History)
Bart Elmore earned his B.A. in history from Dartmouth College in 2004 and his MA (2007) and PhD (2012) from the University of Virginia, specializing in global environmental history and American history. In 2012, he accepted the Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellowship in Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley. He then served three years as Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Alabama beginning in 2013 and helped start the department’s environmental history program before joining the OSU faculty in 2016. He was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America in 2017-2018.
In addition to serving in the history department, Bart is a core faculty member of the Sustainability Institute at OSU. His first book, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (W. W. Norton, 2015) won the Axiom Business Book Award for best business commentary in 2015 and the Council of Graduate Schools 2016 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities. The project, which examines the environmental impact of Coca-Cola’s worldwide operations, grew out of his dissertation at the University of Virginia, but the roots of Bart’s interest in Coca-Cola run deeper, as he grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, the heart of Coke country. Continuing his research at the nexus of business and global environmental history, Bart finished his second book, Seed Money: Monsanto's Past and Our Food Future (W. W. Norton, 2021), which details the international ecological history of the Monsanto Company. It won the 2020 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and the 2022 IACP Food Issues and Matters Award, and was a finalist for both the American Society for Environmental History's George Perkins Marsh Prize and the 2022 Hagley Prize in Business History sponsored by the Business History Conference and the Hagley Museum and Library. In 2022, Bart was awarded the Dan David Award, the largest history prize in the world described by the Washington Post as a new "MacArthur-style 'genius grant.'" He currently edits the Histories of Capitalism and the Environment Series at West Virginia University Press.
In 2023, Bart published his third book, Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade Our Economy and the Planet (Ferris and Ferris, 2023), which came out with the University of North Carolina Press's new trade imprint, Ferris and Ferris. The book traces the ecological history of five southern firms--Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, Walmart, FedEx, and Bank of America--and shows how these firms helped create our have-it-now, fly-by-night, buy-on-credit economy.
Jared Grant (Ohio State, Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics)
Jared Grant is an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics at The Ohio State University. Grant attended Florida A&M University as an USDA 1890s National Scholar and received his BS in Agribusiness with a minor in Economics. He went on to receive both his MS and PhD in Agricultural and Applied Economics from The University of Georgia.
Grant’s research interests include food accessibility, food security, game theory, and behavioral economics. Broadly, he focuses on theorizing, visualizing, and modeling data that improves community well-being. His current work includes creating a variation of the Trust Game that implements a Bayesian game theoretic model that imbeds residents’ trust in government and store operators’ decisions to open and maintain a grocery stores in a low income and low food access area. Additionally, he applied his theoretic Trust Game to primary survey data and secondary data to measure the likelihood of a successful outcome given racial/ethnic disparities
Moderator: Jeffrey Cohen (Ohio State, Anthropology)
Dr. Cohen's research focuses on three areas: migration, development and nutrition. Since the early 1990s he as studied the impact, structure and outcome of migration from indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Mexico to the US with support from the National Science Foundation. He has also conducted comparative research on Mexican, Dominican and Turkish migration. His work on traditional foods, nutrition and migration was supported by the National Geographic Society. In addition to ongoing work in Oaxaca, he is currently studying the migration of Mexicans to Columbus.
Accommodations
To ask questions about accessibility or request accommodations, please contact CEHV Associate Director Aaron Yarmel (yarmel.2@osu.edu). At least two weeks' advance notice will help us to provide seamless access.