Andrew Flachs

Andrew Flachs received his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 2016 and joined the Purdue University faculty in 2017.

Environmental Anthropology, Political Ecology, Agriculture, Qualitative Methods, Food Studies, Ethnobiology, Alternative Agriculture including Genetically Modified Organisms and Organic agriculture, South Asia, North America, Eastern Europe.

Trained as an environmental anthropologist, Dr. Flachs' research spans sustainable agriculture, food studies, the anthropology of knowledge, and political ecology. Through this work, He seeks to better understand how humans create sustainable environmental relationships within the context of markets, ecology, state interventions, and social networks. He is also interested in the ways that humans build and use ecological knowledge to inform agricultural decision-making. His ongoing projects in South Asia, Eastern Europe, and North America use ethnography to bridge the gaps between ecology and economics as we look to better understand the global spread of food and agriculture systems in a changing world. In addition to numerous peer-reviewed scientific papers, Dr. Flachs' writing and photography has appeared in the National Geographic Magazine, the National Geographic Explorer's Journal, Nature: Plants, the Denmark-based Nature and Environment Magazine, Voices for Biodiversity, and he is the co-editor of the Society of Ethnobiology Forage! Blog.

Publications

Flachs, Andrew and Sreenu Panuganti. 2020. “Organic aspirations and in South India.” Economic Anthropology, 7(1):38-50.

Flachs, Andrew. 2019  “The Factish in the Field:  An Anthropological Inquiry of Genetically Modified Seeds and Yields as Beings.”  Science and Technology Studies, 32(3):26-43.

Flachs, Andrew and Glenn Davis Stone. 2019. “Farmer Knowledge Across the Commodification Spectrum in Telangana, India.” Journal of Agrarian Change, 19(4):614-634.

Flachs, Andrew and Joseph Orkin. 2019. “Fermentation and the Ethnobiology of Microbial Entanglement.” Ethnobiology Letters, 10(1):35-39.

Flachs, Andrew. 2019. “Planting and Performing: Anxiety, Aspiration, and “Scripts” in Telangana Cotton Farming.” American Anthropologist, 121(1):48-61.

Flachs, Andrew and Matthew Abel. 2019. “An Emerging Geography of the Agrarian Question:  Spatial Analysis as a tool for Identifying the New American Agrarianism.”  Rural Sociology, 84(2):191-225.

Flachs, Andrew. 2019. Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability, and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Extramural Grant Support
Dr. Flachs' research has been supported by the Volkswagen Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, Purdue University, the United States Department of Education, and the National Geographic Society.