I am currently working on three linked areas of research. First, since 2007, my work has focused on the social and ecological transformations that accompany the industrialization and capitalization of China’s agro-food system, particularly the pork sector. I argue that these relations are key for understanding development imaginaries and trajectories both in China and in the world today. 

The second area of research brings my work on contemporary processes of industrialization and capitalization into conversation with global history. I am one of four leaders of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative, a global network of academics, activists, and artists examining the history of capitalism and the countryside. 

Third, I’m developing a project around questions of waste and wasting and death and dying. By bringing critical food and agrarian studies (‘the belly’) into conversation with discard studies and political ecologies of waste (‘the excremental’), my goal is to examine the production and circulation of ‘waste,’ especially as it relates to ‘value’ in food and farming systems.

I also work on sexual violence in academic field research. I conduct research and publish on researchers' fieldwork experiences, and I have advised university departments and units on how to include sexual violence in curricula, mentorship and advisory relationships, and training programs for students and faculty.

2020    Schneider, Mindi (main applicant) and Pim de Zwart (co-applicant). (2020). Deep Roots: Social Histories and Historical Sociologies of Agriculture, Environment, and Inequality. Setting the Agenda for Commodity Studies at Wageningen University. Wageningen University Excellence Funds. 

2020    Schneider, Mindi. (2020). Convivial Seed Sharing among Minority Women in Yunnan Province: A Collaboration with the China Academy of Sciences. Wageningen University Excellence Funds. 

2020    Hobbis, Stephanie, Elisabet Rasch, Mindi Schneider, and Lotje de Vries. (2020). Acquiring Alternatives: Amplifying Marginal Voices in Development Studies and Building an Intersectional WUR, One Grant Proposal at a Time. Wageningen University Aspasia Grant for women in science. 

2018    Schneider, Mindi. (2018). Political Ecology of Food, Waste, and Value in the 21^st Century. International Institute of Social Studies Research Innovation Facility (Declined).

2009    Schneider, Mindi. (2009). From Farm to Factory: Pigs, Development and Social Change in Contemporary China. Fulbright Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship. 

2009    Schneider, Mindi. (2009). From Farm to Factory: An Analysis of Swine Sector Restructuring and Contemporary Agrarian Change in China. Jeffrey Sean Lehman Fund for Scholarly Exchange with China, Research Grant, Cornell University. 

2008    Schneider, Mindi. (2008). Lam Family Award for South China Research, East Asia Program, Cornell University (Declined).

2007    Schneider, Mindi. (2007). Polson Institute for Global Development, Exploratory Dissertation Research Travel Award, Cornell University. 

2003    Schneider, Mindi (2003). North Central Region Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (NCR-SARE), Graduate Student Research Grant, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 

American Association of Geographers

Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society

American Association of University Women

American Sociological Association

Association for Asian Studies

International Studies Association

My goal in teaching is to facilitate students becoming more critically engaged, academically grounded, confident, and articulate thinkers and doers who are better prepared to take on social and environmental challenges in the 21^st century. Eight core principles guide my teaching, student supervision and mentoring, and educational administration.

First, I try to meet students where they are. What are their goals and interests? What is their familiarity and preparation around the subject matter? What do they need to be successful?

My second principle is listening. To meet students where they are on a continuing basis requires listening. In mentoring and teaching, I ask about and listen to students' interests, questions, goals, needs, and concerns. I ask for their feedback at regular intervals, adjusting where necessary.

The third principle is that I share my own questions, doubts, experiences, and inspirations with students. Too often students feel isolation when they don’t understand a concept or are struggling with an assignment. These feelings are often gendered, racialized, and otherwise related to marginalized positionalities. I’ve found connection with students by acknowledging that academic work is difficult, and sharing that I don’t have all the answers.

My fourth principle is creating community and spaces for engagement and mutual support. Recognizing that students have different interests and concerns, different learning styles and educational backgrounds, different struggles and needs, I look for ways to foster shared learning processes in courses and degree programs, and in supervision.

Fifth, I encourage (and require) students to write, and to learn to write well. Most of my courses and all of my supervisory relationships include some instruction or support on argument and writing. This is especially important when working with students for whom English is not their first language, and for students unfamiliar or uncomfortable with argumentative writing.

Principle six is that questions are as important as answers. There are two dimensions. First, my scholarship is grounded in the notion that how (and by whom) a question is framed suggests and shapes how (and by whom) it will be answered. I regularly bring this basic insight into my teaching and advising, taking inspiration from Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s reminder that “we find the answers to the questions we ask.” The second dimension is that I hope students leave my courses with as many (and better) questions as answers about our subject.

Getting to the roots of problems through lenses of justice and “critical hope” is my seventh principle. The direction of questioning in my teaching excavates the roots of problems by looking at the power relations that underlie them. My orientation is explicitly one of social justice—including environmental justice as an embodied form—helping students situate present-day problems, crises, and inequalities in longer histories (through, for instance, slow violence, social reproduction, or commodity frontiers) and social/human-nature relations (for instance structural racism, patriarchy, colonialism, extractivism). In the current “climate,” I’ve found that students are increasingly unsatisfied with critique for the sake of critique, craving inspiration for how to apply critique to make change. I address this by pairing exploration of the deep roots of socio-ecological problems with studies of “other” or “alternative” visions and practices that might offer more sustainable and just ways forward. In recent years, I’ve designed courses and individual class sessions to explore the roots of food insecurity, environmental degradation and injustices, rural-urban inequality, land grabbing and land use, alongside “other ways” such as Indigenous approaches to seed and food sovereignty, food justice projects, environmental justice movements, commons projects, and legal activism at local and global scales.

Finally, I teach what I most need to learn. As a teacher, I’m also a learner. This is at the core of why and how I became an academic. My curiosity and my commitment to intellectual, pedagogical, and personal growth around social justice and deeper understanding of problems leads me to new arenas. In the past years, I’ve expanded my teaching in development and food politics, agrarian sociology, natural resource management, land and water politics, and field research methods to include questions that I grapple with myself. Questions. of structural racism and anti-racism, coloniality and decoloniality, gendered and sexual violence, and affect, emotions, and mental health, particularly among structurally disadvantaged people and communities living in (structurally) violent environments. I do this through course content, invited guest lecturers from universities and organizations, and engaging with student organizations who are active in arenas I’m trying to learn.