Louisiana Sea Grant: LSU Science Café: Algae: Bayou Harvest
LSU Science Café: Algae: Bayou Harvest
3353 Highland Road Baton Rouge
LA 70802
Subsistence fishing and gardening in South Louisiana is neither recreational nor commercial and therefore rarely documented. Louisiana’s subsistence foodways rely on exchanges between gardeners, hunters, shrimpers, crabbers and fishers in coastal communities. Citrus, cucumbers, crabs and duck are often shared with neighbors, relatives and friends in ways that help build social bonds people rely on in good times and bad. Join us at LSU Science Café to learn about a research project that started after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster and just led to the publication of a new book, Bayou Harvest: Subsistence Practice in Coastal Louisiana, which documents food harvesting and sharing in coastal communities. “Our first task was to figure out how to study it,” researcher and author Helen A. Regis said.
About the Speaker
Helen A. Regis is a professor and cultural anthropologist in the Department of Geography & Anthropology at LSU. She has authored several books, including Fulbe Voices: Marriage, Islam and Medicine in Northern Cameroon, Charitable Choices: Religion, Race and Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era (with John Bartkowski) and is a contributing editor of The House of Dance & Feathers: A Museum by Ronald W. Lewis (with Rachel Breunlin and Ronald Lewis). Her most recent book (with Shana Walton) is Bayou Harvest: Subsistence Practice in Coastal Louisiana (2024). As series editor for the Neighborhood Story Project, Regis has helped create a new canon of collaborative ethnography written by and for New Orleanians about their communities. Her publicly engaged scholarship was recognized by LSU in 2023 with the Brij Mohan Distinguished Professor Award.