Student Research: Jaclyn Wypler '11

Jaclyn Wypler's senior thesis, The Future’s In the Dirt: Local Food, Community and Embeddedness in Hardwick, VT, examined an emerging local food system in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont using the theory of embeddedness. Through interviews, a website content analysis, and participant observation, she investigated the ways in which the local food producers actively constructed social and economically embedded relationships with three broad groups: 1) other local producers, 2) the surrounding working-class community, and 3) their online audiences. After graduation, she worked on the Dartmouth Organic Farm, served as a research assistant to a Dartmouth professor, and coordinated a sustainable agriculture exchange to Peru with a Berkley-based non-profit. She is currently a student in the Sociology Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her interests include agrofood systems, gender, and communities, specifically using ethnography to research female farmers networks.