Merin Oleschuk

Welcome. Thank you for visiting.

I am a sociologist and applied social scientist working at the intersection of food, health & social policy. Until recently, I held a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In my current role, I work as a public policy researcher where I manage research and evaluation in the public sphere and help put research into practice within community.

In my academic research, I study how social inequalities shape food and the practices surrounding it such as cooking, eating, and grocery shopping, alongside their implications for health, wellbeing, and social justice.

I am also interested in how researchers can best study people’s values, meanings and practices. I draw from diverse methods in my research, including: qualitative individual and focus group interviews, participant observation, photo voice exercises, food recall conversations, discourse & content analysis, participatory asset mapping, ethnography, and quantitative survey analysis.

If you are interested in the moral politics of meat consumption, I have a co-authored book coming out in June! Written with Josée Johnston, Shyon Baumann, and Emily Huddart, Happy Meat: The Sadness and Joy of a Paradoxical Idea, helps explain why some consumers turn to meat they see as more healthy, ethical, and sustainable (i.e., “happy”), to keep eating it amid rising concerns about the meat industry’s many harms.

My research has been published in journals such as Social Problems, Appetite, Gender & Society, Sociological Forum, and Qualitative Sociology, and has received awards from the American Sociology Association’s Consumers & Consumption Section, The Canadian Association for Food Studies, and the Canadian Anthropology Society. My research has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Culinaria Research Institute, and both the Ontario and Alberta Graduate Scholarship Programs.