Kyle Piispanen, PhD

I hold a PhD in Environmental Science and Policy and teach across environmental anthropology, agroecology, food systems, and sustainability. I am particularly interested in experiential and transdisciplinary education that connects critical scholarship with field-based learning.

My scholarship inquires into multispecies relationships and the forms of ecological understanding that emerge through sustained engagement with particular landscapes. I examine how these relationships contribute to the continuity of diverse agricultural systems amid the ecological and cultural simplifications associated with industrial agriculture. I divide my time between Mexico City and San Andrés Cholula, Puebla, where I remain active in teaching, field research, and community-engaged projects.

My doctoral dissertation, Reassembling the Milpa: Multispecies Entanglements of Foraged Foods in Highland Mexico, draws on more than twenty years of ethnographic engagement with farming communities in Mexico, including sustained research in the Puebla–Tlaxcala Valley. The project examines how campesino communities cultivate and maintain the complex agroecological relationships that constitute milpa agriculture. I focus particularly on the intersections among agricultural practice, foraged foods, multispecies life, food-system activism, and biocultural diversity.

My previous research includes participatory work with small-scale farmers in Chile's Chiloé Archipelago, where I studied agrobiodiversity, foodscapes, and cultural identity. In the Bolivian Yungas, my research focused on coca agriculture, native foods, food sovereignty, and grassroots development.

I have taught at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, where my courses have addressed environmental anthropology, biocultural diversity, the Anthropocene, and sustainable food systems. At Babeș-Bolyai University in Romania, I taught seminars on agroecology and the cultural politics of food. I have also been a visiting scholar at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur in Mexico, where I presented research on agricultural simplification and feral proliferations.