Yuki Kato is an urban sociologist whose research interests intersect the subfields of social stratification, food and environment justice, culture and consumption, and symbolic interaction. She has conducted research on the rise of urban agricultural cultivation and the alternative food movement in post-Katrina New Orleans, with a particular focus on food access disparity, spatial and social landscape of alternative food activism, and contested meanings of local during a major urban transformation. Her new research project examines the role of social entrepreneurs working on Environmental and Food Justice work in a gentrifying city. She also has a project underway that explores historical erasure and "discovery" of folk gardening/farming in urban BIPOC communities across the United States.
BOOK
Her book, Gardens of Hope: Cultivating Food and the Future in a Post-Disaster City (NYU Press), is scheduled to be published in Spring 2025. The study is based on a decade-long, multi-method data collection using in-depth interviews and archival data and examines why urban farming captured the hopes and imagination of those wishing to assist in the city's recovery from the disaster, and how these well-intended efforts became tangled up in the neoliberal redevelopment of the city to create largely white, younger, newcomer representation in the practice.
Her co-edited book with Alison H Alkon and Joshua Sbicca, A Recipe forGentrification, was published by the NYU Press in 2020.
JOURNAL ARTICLES AND CONFERENCES
Her research has been published in numerous journals, including City & Community, Urban Studies, Symbolic Interactions, Journal of Agriculture and Human Values, and Sociological Inquiry. She has presented research at conferences domestically and internationally, such as the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, the Urban Affairs Association, the Association of American Geographers, the Society for the Study of Social Problem.
TEACHING
At Georgetown, Professor Kato regularly teaches Introduction to Sociology, including courses that align with her research such as Sociology of Food, Culture and Consumption, and Environmental and Food Justice Movements.
EDUCATION
Professor Kato earned a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, in 2007. She graduated from University of Massachusetts Amherst with double majors in Sociology and Communication, and minors in Spanish and Chinese.