Alexandra Ketchum

 Research Interests: Studying the role of technology, food, feminism, and environmentalism in 20th century social movements in the United States and Canada. Examining lesbian and feminist restaurants and cafés. Interested in past imaginings of utopia through business creation and the implementation of communications technologies. Her work integrates food, environmental, technological, and gender history.

Ketchum's first peer-reviewed book, Engage in Public Scholarship!: A Guidebook on Feminist and Accessible Communication(Concordia University Press, 2022), examines the power dynamics that impact who gets to create certain kinds of academic work and for whom these outputs are accessible. The environmental, social, and economic conditions in which scholars are presently working, marked by digital technologies and climate change, matter. Two initial questions guide this book: what is “feminist” and “accessible” scholarship? This text does not focus on all feminist scholarship, but rather is interested in a feminist perspective on public-facing scholarship that aims to be accessible. These questions are further complicated by the challenge of sustainability. The book will be available in open access and in print in Spring 2022. 

Ketchum's second book, Ingredients for Revolution (coming out Fall 2022), is a history of lesbian feminist restaurants, cafes, and coffeehouses in the United States from the 1972 to present. 

Ketchum has organized the SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada) funded, Feminist and Accessible Publishing and Communications Technologies Speaker and Workshop Series (feministandaccessiblepublishingandtechnology.com) She is the founder of The Feminist Restaurant Project (www.thefeministrestaurantproject.com). Ketchum is co-founder and editor of The Historical Cooking Project (historicalcookingproject.com), a website dedicated to food history scholarship and the former co-founder of Food, Feminism, and Fermentation (foodfeminismfermentation.com). For a full list of her publications, go to alexketchum.ca.