Andrew Deener, assistant professor of sociology, has won a highly competitive Robert Wood Johnson Foundation award that will allow him to spend two years on ethnographic research on food options and choices in Philadelphia neighborhoods.
He is one of 18 scholars chosen this year for an RWJ Foundation Health & Society Scholars program award.
He will study how and why certain neighborhoods have or lack access to certain foods, how people choose foods, and how choices are affected by the political-economic organization of the city.
Where a person lives not only influences access to a wide variety of food options, says Deener. It also may result in greater access to other good health options.
He previously studied five Los Angeles neighborhoods over six years, tracing why some stayed diverse and some became racially and socioeconomically homogeneous.
For his new two-year project, which begins in August, he will be based at the University of Pennsylvania’s site for the RWJ Foundation Health & Society Scholars program.
In the Los Angeles study, done for his Ph.D. dissertation at UCLA, he found instances of homeless people who had gardens in public spaces and immigrants who participated in community gardens – low-income versions of the sustainable food movement that was popular in the farmer’s markets and rooftop gardens of higher-income areas.
This showed “how people overcome their constraints on food options,” he says.
Whether people choose healthy food if it is available is another question that he will study.
His research involves participant observation – that is, spending time getting to know people, learning what their daily routines are like, and seeing the differences between what they say and what they do. In his last project, he also interviewed at length more than 150 people.
The questions constantly change as data are uncovered, he notes.
Deener came to UConn in 2008 after finishing his Ph.D. in sociology at UCLA. A native of New Jersey, he earned his BA at Pennsylvania State University and master’s degrees from the New School for Social Research and UCLA.
The RWJ Foundation Health & Society Scholars program funds post-doctoral research opportunities for scholars early in their careers.
