Tony Weis

Professor

Tony Weis

Contact Information

Office: Room 1403, SSC
Tel: 519 661-2111, 87472
E-mail: aweis@uwo.ca

Research Areas

Global agro-food systems, industrial agriculture (especially livestock production), political ecology

Research Interests

My research is broadly located in the field of political ecology, with a focus on the power, inequalities, and biophysical instabilities associated with globalized agriculture and food systems, including the explicit and implicit (environmental externalities) subsidies that brace the competitiveness of industrial production. Over the past decade this work has centered most of all on the transformations associated with the industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex and the soaring scale of animal consumption, and the momentous implications for the environment, food security, and inter-species relations this entails.

Personal Website


Teaching

GEO 1200 – The Climate Emergency (new in 2020)

GEO 2156 – Animal Geographies

GEO 3441 – Conservation and Development

GEO 3445 – Global Agriculture and Food Systems

GEO 9330 – Agriculture and Rural Development


Supervised Graduate Students and Theses Titles

PhD Students

  • H. Peacock (joint-supervised) (Current) A global GIS analysis of primate diversity and biogeography: Assessing trends in habitat loss and extinction risk to information primate conservation biology
  • R. Ellis (2021) Pollinator People: an ethnography of bees, bee advocates and possibilities for multispecies commoning in Toronto and London, ON
  • S. Vercillo (joint-supervised) (2018) The Differentiation of Smaller Farming and Household Food Responsibilities in Northern Ghana
  • S. McFarlane-Morris (joint-supervised) (2017) A Political Ecology of Mass Tourism Development on the Jamaican North Coast
  • B. Vogel (joint-supervised) (2016) The Case of Multi-Level Governance and Municipal Adaption
  • M. Steckley (2015) Agrarian Change and Peasant Prospects in Haiti
  • K. Ross (2014) Divergent Responses to Tropical Commodity Dependence after the demise of EU-ACP Preferential Trade

Masters Students

  • S. Phillips (2020) Can community gardens improve food banks? Lessons from Southwestern Ontario
  • E. Galley (2011) Remaking a Forestry Town: The Multifaceted Challenges of Transition in Port Alberni, BC
  • A. Al-khoury (2010) The Struggle to Get Back to the Land: New Farmers and Agriculture in Ontario
  • C. Hickey (2010) Adapting to Climate Change in Guyana: Necessities, Options and Constraints
  • A. Park (2010) The Iwokrama Challenge: Balancing Conservation and Development in Guyana
  • L. Riley (co-supervised) (2008) Children's Geography and the Everyday Lives of Orphans in Malawi

Publications

Authored Books

Weis, T. 2013 The Ecological Hoofprint: The Global Burden of Industrial Livestock (London and New York: Zed Books).

Weis, T. 2007 The Global Food Economy: The Battle for the Future of Farming (London and New York: Zed Books).

Edited Books

Edelman, M., J.C. Scott, A. Baviskar, S.M. Borras Jr., E. Holt-Gimenez, D. Kandiyoti, T. Weis, and W. Wolford (eds.) (2015) Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty (London and New York: Routledge).

Black, T., S. D’Arcy, T. Weis, and J. Kahn-Russell (eds.) (2014) A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice (Toronto and New York.Between the Lines and PM Press)

Refereed Journals (past 7 years)

Ellis, B., Weis, T., Surayanaman, S. and Beilin, K (2020) From a free gift of nature to a precarious commodity: Bees, pollination services, and industrial agriculture. Journal of Agrarian Change. doi: 10.1111/joac.12360

Weis, T. (2018) Ghosts and Things: Agriculture and the Trajectory of Animal Life. Global Environmental Politics. 18(2), 134-42.

Steckley, M. and Weis, T. (2017) Agriculture in and beyond the Haitian Catastrophe. Third World Quarterly. 38(1), 1-17.

Weis, T. (2016) Towards 120 Billion: Dietary Change and Animal Lives. Radical Philosophy. 199(5), 8-13.

Weis, T. and Singh, T.  (2016) Transformative Scholarship: The Praxis of C.Y. Thomas. The CLR James Journal. 22(1/2), 19-22.

Steckley, M. and Weis, T. (2016) Peasant balances, Neoliberalism, and the Stunted Growth of Non-Traditional Agro-Exports in Haiti. Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. 41(1), 1-22.

Weis, T. (2015) Meatification and the Madness of the Doubling Narrative. Canadian Food Studies. 2(2), 296-303.

Ross, K. and Weis, T. (2015) Struggling to Compete: Liberalization and Belizean Banana Production. Social and Economic Studies. 64(2), 1-27.

Anand, S.A., Hawkes, C., de Souza, R. J., Mente, A., Dehghan, M., Nugent, R.,  Zulyniak, M. A., Weis, T., Bernstein, A. M.,  Krauss, R., Kromhout, D., Jenkins, D. J. A.,  Malik, V., Martinez-Gonzalez, M. A., Mozafarrian, D., Yusuf, S.,  Willett, W. C. and Popkin B. M. (2015) Food Consumption and its impact on Cardiovascular Disease: Importance of Solutions focused on the globalized food system. Journal of the American College of Cardiology. 66(14), 1590-1614.

Edelman, M., Weis, T., Baviskar, A., Borras Jr., S. M., Holt-Gimenez, E., Kandiyoti, D. and Wolford, W. (2014) Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty.  Journal of Peasant Studies. 41(6), 911-931.

Weis, T. (2013) The Meat of the Global Food Crisis. Journal of Peasant Studies. 40(1), 65-85.

Chapters in Books

Weis, T., M. Steckley, and B. Frayne (2020) An Impermanent Subsidy: cheap industrial food and the urban margins. In: Crush, J. and B. Frayne (eds.): Elgar Handbook on Food Security in Cities of the Global South. Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. In press.

Weis, T. and Elllis, R.A. (2020) Animal functionality and interspecies relations in regenerative agriculture: debating necessity and the possibilities of non-violence. In: Duncan, J., M. Carolan, and H. Wiskerke (eds.). The Routledge Handbook of Sustainable and Regenerative Food Systems. London: Routledge, pp. 141-53.

Weis, T. (2020) Food security and food sovereignty. In: Kobayashi, A. (ed.): International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd ed., vol. 5. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 191-96.

Weis, T. (2020) Confronting meatification. In: Martin, S. and R. Katz-Rosene (eds.): Green Meat: Is there an agro-ecological alternative to industrial meat? Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. pp. 29-42.

Weis. T. (2019) Agriculture from imperialism to neoliberalism. In: Ness, I. and Z. Cope (eds.): The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave.

Weis, T. (2017) A Political Ecology Approach to Industrial Food Production. In: Koc, M., J. Sumner, and T. Winson (eds.): Critical Perspectives in Food Studies, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 118-34.

Weis, T. (2016) Industrial Livestock and the Ecological Hoofprint: Inequality, Degradation, and Violence. The Routledge Handbook on Rural Studies. Routledge: London.

Weis, T.  (2016) The meatification of diets. The Routledge Handbook on Food and Nutrition Security. Routledge: London.

Weis, T. (2016) A Political Ecology Approach to Industrial Food Production. Critical Perspectives in Food Studies, 2nd ed. Oxford University Press: Toronto.

Weis, T., Black, T., D’Arcy, S. and Kahn-Russell, J. (2014) Drawing a Line in the Tar Sands.  A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice. Between the Lines and PM Press: Toronto and New York.      (modified and re-published in The Bullet, E-Bulletin No. 1053, Nov. 10, 2014).