Julie Harriet Guthman (born 1957) is an American geographer and Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work has dealt with the political economy of California agriculture, the certification and limits of organic farming, the politics of obesity, the chemical and biological foundations of the California strawberry industry, and the Silicon Valley-based tech forays into food and agriculture. She is the author of five books with the University of California Press, including Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California (2004), Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism (2011), Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry (2019), and The Problem with Solutions: Why Silicon Valley Can't Hack the Future of Food (2024). Guthman held a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship and a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship at Harvard University in 2017–2018.
Early life and education Guthman has described her father as a "health-food advocate" of the 1950s and 1960s who imposed strict dietary rules at home. She told the Harvard Gazette that as a child she would visit friends' houses to eat the junk food forbidden in her own. She received a BA in sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1979. After her undergraduate degree, Guthman worked in California progressive politics and the nonprofit sector, including a period in 1981–1982 as Northern California Director of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign and several years through 1985 in administrative and fundraising roles at the Oakland-based voter-mobilization group Voting P.O.W.E.R. She earned an MBA at the Haas School of Business in 1988 and worked afterwards as a financial administrator for the public broadcaster KQED in San Francisco and as fiscal manager for the Child Care Coordinating Council of San Mateo County. A trip to Southeast Asia, Guthman has said, redirected her interest toward agriculture and prompted a return to UC Berkeley for graduate study. She earned an MA in geography in 1995, with a thesis on environmental crisis discourse in Nepal, and a PhD in geography in 2000. Her doctoral dissertation, Agrarian Dreams? The Paradox of Organic Farming in California, was supervised by Michael J. Watts and became the basis of her first book.
Career
Early academic appointments Guthman was a Kevin Starr Postdoctoral Fellow in California Studies at the University of California Humanities Research Institute in 2000. Between 2001 and 2003 she lectured at UC Berkeley in the departments of Geography and of Environmental Science, Policy and Management.
University of California, Santa Cruz Guthman joined UC Santa Cruz as an assistant professor in the Department of Community Studies in 2003, a program that revolves on students conducting in-depth field studies with social justice and social change organizations. She was promoted to associate professor in 2007 and to full professor in 2012. She was named Distinguished Professor in 2024 and as of 2026 holds the title Distinguished Professor of Sociology Emerita, with affiliations in the Community Studies Program, the Department of Sociology, and the Department of Environmental Studies. In April 2017 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to support a book project on the soil pathogen Verticillium dahliae and the California strawberry industry. She held the Guggenheim concurrently with the 2017–2018 Frances B. Cashin Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Editor Guthman has co-edited the University of California Press book series Critical Environments: Nature, Science, and Politics since 2012 and has served as associate editor of California Agriculture since 2019. She sits on the editorial boards of Antipode (since 2014), the Journal of Peasant Studies (international advisory board, since 2018), Environment and Planning F (inaugural editorial board, since 2021), and Food and Society: New Directions published by Bristol University Press (inaugural editorial board, since 2023).
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
