Elizabeth Fitting

Cross appointments

• Environment, Sustainability and Society
  
• Gender and Women's Studies
• International Development Studies

Education

• BA, University of Toronto
• MA, PhD, New School for Social Research

Research interests

Liz Fitting is a social anthropologist interested in how social, cultural, and political practices are shaped through, and in turn, shape --or even challenge and transform-- capitalist processes and formations, particularly in relation to migration, food, and agriculture. She has researched various aspects of the culture and political economy of food, ranging from the regulation of, and public debate around, transgenic maize in Mexico, the effects of structural adjustment and trade liberalization policies on agricultural livelihoods and labour migration to activist responses to seed regulations in Colombia and Mexico. Her current research focuses on the livelihoods of seasonal agricultural workers from Mexico and Jamaica who are employed in Atlantic Canada, and explores questions related to the food system, social reproduction, and the uneven effects of the global economy.

Dr. Fitting is a principal investigator for the Warming Oceans, Changing Livelihoods project, part of the Climate Justice: Values and Vulnerabilities Lab. https://cjv2.ca/

Along with a team of collaborators (Dr. Margaret Robinson, Dr. Nick J. Mule, and Dr. Schem Bader, and RAs Joseph Lahey and Dani Sherwood), Dr. Fitting has led a SSHRC funded project to collect first-hand accounts of coming out or being out as 2SLGBTQ+ during the AIDS crisis in Canada. It wrapped up in 2025. https://www.comingoutduringaids.ca/

Selected publications    

• Bryan, C. and E. Fitting, 2025 “Structured Exclusions, Partial inclusions: Transnational Care Chains and Temporary Foreign Workers in Atlantic Canada”, Dialectical Anthropology 49, 337–364. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-025-09765-z
• Fitting, E. 2025. “The agricultural care chains of migrant farmworkers: land, livelihoods and social reproduction”, Agriculture and Human Values. 
• Fitting, E. 2024. “Corn” in Jeannie Whayne (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History. Pp 251-268. Oxford University Press. 
• Fitting, E., Bryan, C., Foster, K. and Ellsworth, J. 2022. Re-centering labour in local food: local washing and the growing reliance on permanently temporary migrant farmworkers in Nova Scotia. Agriculture and Human Values.
• Fitting, Elizabeth, Laura Gutiérrez Escobar, and Tamara Wattnem, 2021. “Contesting seed standards: The Red de Semillas Libres in Colombia” in Graham, J.E., Holmes, C.P., McDonald, F., and Darnell, R. (eds). 2021. The Social Life of Standards. UBC Press. Pp. 141-158.
• 2018. "Genetically Modified Crops and the Remaking of Latin America’s Food Landscape” in eds. Pascale Joassart-Marcelli and Fernando J. Bosco, Food and Place: A Critical Exploration. Rowman & Littlefield. Pp. 52-66.
• Gutiérrez Escobar, L., and Fitting, E. 2016 The Red de Semillas Libres: Contesting Biohegemony in Colombia. Journal of Agrarian Change, doi: 10.1111/joac.12161.
• 2016  “From working the farm to fast food and back again: Rural Mexicans in the Neoliberal Food System” in eds. Meredith Abarca and Consuelo Salas, Latin@s' Presence in the Food Industry: Changing How We Think about Food University of Arkansas Press. Pp. 77-100.
• 2014 “Cultures of Corn and anti-GM activism in Mexico and Colombia” in (eds) Carole Counihan and Valeria Siniscalchi, Food Activism: Agency, Democracy and Economy. Berg.
• 2012  Japanese translation of The Struggle for Maize, with new preface. Translator: Minoru Satomi. Nobunkyo, Rural Culture Association.
• 2011  The Struggle for Maize: Campesinos, Workers, and Transgenic Corn in the Mexican Countryside, Duke University Press.