Priya Fielding-Singh

Priya is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Sociology Department studying health, sustainability, and inequality. Her research investigates on the one hand, the roots of inequality, and on the other, the means to remedy it.

Her first area of research asks how various dimensions of inequality originate and are reproduced. Her dissertation, based on field research at a socioeconomically and ethnically diverse high school in Silicon Valley, investigates how parents transmit food-related health and environmental values to their children. By examining this transmission process, she seeks to understand how food-related practices are reproduced inter-generationally, as well as the implications of that reproduction for human and planetary health.

Her second area of research examines the circumstances under which individuals are motivated to challenge inequality. She studies contemporary activism and the process by which some but not all youth come to engage in and remain involved in social justice causes. Focusing on the food and environmental movements, she utilizes a variety of methods from longitudinal surveys to in-depth interviews to understand when individuals will partake in personal and collective action on behalf of their beliefs.

With the underlying goal of remedying food and environmental injustices, Priya's research is inherently applied. She hopes that her scholarship will not only help identify effective routes for systems reform, but also contribute to broader discussions about social equity and justice.

Priya is currently a Research Assistant at the Stanford Clayman Institute for Gender Research and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. During her doctoral studies, she has been a Fellow at the Center for Ethics in Society and the Haas Center for Public Service. Priya is also the Director of the annual Childhood Obesity Bay Area Conference and a former researcher at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Priya holds a B.S. in Education and Social Policy from Northwestern University and a M.A. in Cultural Studies from the University of Bremen, Germany.