Michaela DeSoucey

Bio/Description

Michaela DeSoucey received her PhD from the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University in 2010, where she was also a Graduate Legal Studies Fellow.  She studies the interplay of social movements, markets, and state systems shaping the cultural and moral politics of food. Her dissertation, Gullet Politics: Contentious Foie Gras Politics and the Organization of Public Morality in the United States and France, won the 2010 SION (Social Interaction & Organizing at Northwestern) Arthur Stinchcombe Dissertation Prize in Organization Studies. An article drawn from her dissertation, “Gastronationalism: Food Traditions and Authenticity Politics in the European Union,” was published in June 2010 in the American Sociological Review and has won graduate student paper awards from the ASA sections of Political Sociology, Economic Sociology, and Sociology of Culture. Michaela has also conducted research and published articles on the rhetoric of organizational restructuring; local food movements; the regulation and institutionalization of the organic food industry; and the development of a market for grass-fed beef and dairy products.