The Fisherfolk Feeding the Megacity: Food Security, Livelihoods and Value Chains in Lagos’ Informal Waterfront Settlements

Seminar in Critical Development Studies

About the speaker

Kristina Sokourenko is passionate about monitoring access to healthy and sustainable diets in low and middle-income contexts while developing novel food security metrics to inform interventions in agriculture, public health and nutrition. She is dedicated to establishing collaborative research networks that can alter the way we think about, monitor, and empower our food systems to serve all. As a Ph.D. student in Development Studies at Cornell University, Kristina specializes in food systems approaches with a focus on culturally-sensitive dietary assessment methods and the cost and affordability of healthy diets. She has partnered with the Global Diet Quality Project (Harvard School of Public Health, GAIN & Gallup World Poll), the Food Prices for Nutrition team (Tufts University, World Bank & IFPRI), and the Food Systems Dashboard. In the past, she has worked for the World Food Programme in Armenia, the World Health Organization in Paris, and the UN Medical Services Division in New York. She holds a Master's degree in Global Health & Public Affairs from SciencesPo, as well as a Master's in Bioethics from NYU, where she also completed her undergraduate studies in Anthropology and Environmental Science.

About the series

The Critical Development Studies Seminar Series is a graduate student-led effort that aims to provide space for junior scholars to share innovative research and discuss emergent debates within critical development studies.

Invited speakers cover a range of geographical areas, disciplinary backgrounds, and research topics. Examples of potential topics include agroecology and food justice issues, state-building, land and labor, extractivist politics, the gendered and racial dynamics of ongoing capitalist development, and the political ecological histories of the global development project. The target audience for the series is graduate students and faculty interested in critical development studies both within the Cornell community as well as external scholars.