Susanne Freidberg is Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College and was a Senior Visiting Research Fellow in the Harvard Kennedy School’s STS Program during the 2017-2018 academic year.  Her research centers on the politics, technoscientific practices and social relationships that shape food supply chains. Her current project, funded by the National Science Foundation, examines major food companies’ use of science and technology in their efforts to assess and improve the sustainability of raw material supplies.

In past projects, Susanne has conducted multi-site ethnographies of the epistemic communities that model food’s environmental “footprint” and that assess the safety and ethical qualifications of transnationally-traded fresh produce.  She has also studied the social and technological history of freshness in food.  She is the author of two books, French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age (Oxford, 2004) and Fresh: A Perishable History (Harvard, 2009).  She received her doctorate from the University of California-Berkeley.

Publications

2017 Big Food, little data: The slow harvest of corporate food supply chain sustainability initiatives. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 1-18. doi: 10.1080/24694452.2017.1309967.

2015   It’s complicated: Corporate sustainability and the uneasiness of life cycle assessment.  Science as Culture, 24, 2, 157-82.

2014   Footprint technopolitics. Geoforum, 55, 178-189.