Alyssa Paredes

Alyssa Paredes is an environmental and economic anthropologist with research interests at the intersection of industrial agriculture, transnational supply chains, and environmental litigation in the inter-Asian region. She carries out immersive and socially engaged fieldwork in the Philippines and Japan. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology with distinction from Yale University.

Her first book project, Bananapocalypse: Plantation Capitalism from the Philippine South, begins with two observations: existential crises hang over the producers of the world’s food, and many of them are self-inflicted. In the southern Philippine region of Mindanao, banana plantations unleash pesticide drift, food waste, water effluent, and fungal pathogens into the surroundings. Filipino plantocratic elite and Japanese import partners shirk responsibility for these excesses, framing them as “external” to their supply chains. However, they are regularly proven wrong in their assumption that the things they push downstream will not double back to haunt them. Bananapocalypse traces the afterlives of the externalities that commodity production removes from its ambit of accountability, offering an ethnographic model for turning the commodity chain inside-out. In so doing, it considers the possibility that Big Ag’s failures to reproduce itself are more than just minor inconveniences to business-as-usual.

Dr. Paredes has also served as project lead for community consultations in Mindanao through the UM Inclusive Histories Project ReConnect/ReCollect 2.0: Reparative Connections to Philippine Collections at the University of Michigan (co-PIs: Ricky Punzalan and Deirdre de la Cruz). 

More information on her research, publications, and teaching can be viewed on her website.

Highlighted Works

Books

• Under contract. Bananapocalypse: Plantation Capitalism from the Philippine South. University of California Press. 
• 2025. Halo-Halo Ecologies: The Emergent Environments Behind Filipino Food, edited by Alyssa Paredes and Marvin Joseph F. Montefrio. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 

Journal Articles and Book Chapters

I. Plantation Capitalism, Science, and Litigation

• forthcoming. "Plantation Liberalism: A Genealogy of Personhood, Property, and Activism between Philippine Mindanao and the Black Atlantic,” Current Anthropology.
• 2024. “Plantation Methodologies: Questioning Scale, Space, and Subjecthood,” with Sophie Chao and Andrés Leon Araya. In Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography Interventions, edited by Alyssa Paredes, Sophie Chao, and Andrés Leon Araya.
• 2023. “Experimental Science for the “Bananapocalypse”: Counter Politics in the Plantationocene.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology. 88(4): 837–863.
  • Recipient of the Anthropology and Environment Society’s Bonnie J. McKay Junior Scholar Prize, 2021 (online ahead of print)
  • Recipient of the Culture and Agriculture Robert M. Netting Prize, 2018 (earlier draft)
• 2022. “We Are Not Pests.” In The Promise of Multispecies Justice, edited by Sophie Chao, Karin Bolender, and Eben Kirksey. Durham: Duke University Press.
• 2020. “Chemical Cocktails Defy Pathogens and Regulatory Paradigms” In Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene, edited by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou. Stanford Digital Projects – Stanford University Press.

II. The Global Commodity Chain: Excesses and Alternatives

• 2025. “The Chain Before the Commodity: Turning Transnational Solidarity into Alternative Trade between Japan and the Philippines,” Journal of Asian Studies 84 (1): 81–101.
• 2023. “The Political Work of Food Delivery: Consumer Cooperative Systems and Women’s Labor in ‘Relationless’ Japan.” Food, Culture & Society 26(5): 1174–1192.
• 2021. “Weedy Activism: Women, Plants, and the Genetic Pollution of Urban Japan.” Journal of Political Ecology 28(1): 70-90.
  • Recipient of the Political Ecology Society Eric Wolf Prize, 2020 (earlier draft)

III. Taste as Transnational Social History

• 2025. “Topographies of Fungibility: Reinventing the Japanese Taste for Sweetness in the Philippine Highlands,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 67(2): 377–403. 
  • Recipient of the Christine Wilson Graduate Student Paper Prize, 2018 (earlier draft)
• 2024. “Banana Ketchup: Food Memory and Forgotten Labor across the Filipino Homeland/Diaspora Divide.” Gastronomica: Journal of Critical Food Studies 24(2): 32-42.

Essays on Pedagogy

• 2024. “The Environmental Wayfarer Project: Problem Solving with an Eco-Anxious Generation,” with Lai Wo, Society for Cultural Anthropology, Teaching Tools.
• 2024. "The Political Statement: Thinking Beyond the End-of-Term Paper," with Felipe Coimbra Moretti, Society for Cultural Anthropology, Teaching Tools. 

Highlighted Grants

• National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Grant
• Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship    
• Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant
• Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellowship Program