Michele Companion

Michèle Companion is a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. She received her PhD from the University of Arizona in 2003. Her work has focused on Native American reservation nutritional dynamics, including impacts of low-income diets on overall health and on reservation food security issues. She has also been documenting tribal participation in the food sovereignty movement to reclaim cultural aspects of traditional foods. More recently, she has been focusing on food security and long-term health implications of food access for urban Indian populations by examining cultural barriers to healthy eating among low-income urban Indian populations. Companion works as a food and livelihood security consultant to international humanitarian aid organizations. She has worked extensively across Africa in countries including Malawi, Mozambique, Angola, South Africa, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Somalia with organizations that include Save the Children, U.S., U.S. Agency for International Development, Counterpart International, Famine Early Warning Systems Network, International Relief and Development, and Global Food and Nutrition, Inc.

Her current work focuses on the expansion of food security indicators to increase local sensitivity to food crisis triggers, especially in local markets; and on population displacement, migration, and resettlement. She edited the volume "Disaster’s Impact on Livelihood and Cultural Survival: Losses, Opportunities, and Mitigation" (2015, CRC Press), and co-edited "Street Food: Culture, Economy, Health, and Governance" with Ryzia de Cassia Vieira Cardoso and Stefano Marras (2014, Earthscan from Routledge). She will be a visiting professor at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute at Kyoto University in the Fall of 2017.