The Quinoa Bust: The Making and Unmaking of an Andean Miracle Crop

About the speaker

Emma McDonell is a cultural, economic, and environmental anthropologist interested in the applications of ethnographic research to real world problems. Her expertise and interest lies in the intersections of food systems, global markets, sustainable development, and race/racism in Latin America and how anthropological research can contribute to solving urgent global problems like climate change and economic inequality. Dr. McDonell is a Fulbright Scholar (Peru, 2016) who has taught anthropology at Indiana University, Butler University, and the University of Zürich (Switzerland). Her research has been published in a number of journals including Gastronomica, Agriculture & Human Values, and the Latin American Research Review.

In 2025, Dr. McDonell is a fellow at the The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany working on an inter-disciplinary team of experts developing policy recommendations for global agricultural biodiversity policy.

Her book, titled The Quinoa Bust: The Making and Unmaking of an Andean Miracle Crop (University of California Press, 2025) traces the unintended consequences of the quinoa boom and bust in the Peruvian Andes, drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork over the course of the boom and bust in Puno, Peru. She also published Critical Approaches to Superfoods, an interdisciplinary book critically analyzing the concept of the superfood (with Bloomsbury Press).

Ph.D. Anthropology, Indiana University
M.A. Anthropology, Indiana University
B.A. Environmental Studies and Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz

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.