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 where I led the Food Equity & Dignity (FED) Lab.

As a sociologist of food, I study how social inequalities shape food and the practices surrounding it such as cooking, eating, and grocery shopping. Food plays a critical role in fostering healthy individuals, families and communities. Yet, our food practices are bound up in an array of competing desires, priorities and constraints that affect their relationship to health in complex ways. My research offers expertise into how intersecting inequalities shape the food practices of vulnerable individuals and families, 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.

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.