Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Alyssa Paredes is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Originally from Manila, she is a socio-cultural anthropologist researching plantation economies, transnational food systems, and environmental justice activism between the Philippines and Japan. Her book manuscript, tentatively titled Bananapocalypse: Ecologies of Plantation Capitalism in a Global Mindanao, draws on immersive fieldwork to identify crop science, agrochemical regulation, food cosmetic standards, and watershed management as arenas where Filipino and Japanese actors contend over the food system’s various externalities. Aspects of this research appear in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, the Journal of Political Ecology, and Food, Culture, and Society, as well as in edited collections like The Promise of Multispecies Justice (Duke University Press, 2022) and Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene (Stanford University Press, 2020). Paredes is also co-editor of Halo-Halo Ecologies: The Precarious Environments Behind Filipino Food, forthcoming with the University of Hawaiʻi Press. She holds a PhD with distinction from Yale University.