I am a Lecturer in Human Geography at the School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, and a Research Associate in Human Geography at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. The different strands of my research are bound by two themes: the socialities of alternative food networks and, more recently, political economic and cultural factors leading to dietary and food systems change. I seek to understand and explain everyday barriers and opportunities for more equitable, healthy and sustainable food systems, particularly (though not exclusively) in post-colonial contexts.  My email address is: marisa.wilson@ed.ac.uk

Food-related inequalities and agrarian change; qualitative approaches to nutrition transition; Latin America and the Caribbean; transnational sugar histories; moral economies and moral economy research; politics of scale; mainstream and alternative value systems

Cultural and Historical Geography Research Group, Human Geography Research Group, Population Health and Place Research Group, Global Development Academy, Centre for Contemporary Latin American Studies

My primary research aim is to develop interdisciplinary ideas and practices that can be used to create (more) sustainable and socially-just food systems. My recent work on Trinidad (Wilson 2016, 2017; Wilson and McLennan 2019) illustrates cultural reasonings behind the consumption of highly unhealthy processed foods, and political economic, racialised and historical reasons for progressively destructive agricultural land use (Wilson 2016, 2017). I use a comparative historical approach to identify particular characteristics (e.g. rural and racial marginalisation, land monopolies, values of modernity, the vertical integration of supply chains) that make Trinidad and Tobago an exemplar of postcolonial island food economies, vis-à-vis Cuba (Wilson 2017) which has a very different political and moral economic structure (Wilson 2012, 2014a, 2014b). I am currently exploring the use of digital methods to increase understandings of sugar’s complex and transnational histories and geographies in Scotland and the West Indies.