Sarah Elton, PhD

Assistant Professor
Eakin Chair in Critical Qualitative Health Research Methodology
Social and Behavioural Health Sciences Division
Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto

Biosketch

Sarah Elton is an Assistant Professor and inaugural Eakin Chair in Critical Qualitative Health Research Methodology in the Social and Behavioural Health Sciences Division at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto.

Dr. Elton researches the human-ecosystems-health nexus in the city. She employs critical qualitative research methods in her work on gardens, produce chains, and the human gut microbiome, often drawing on  posthumanist theory in her analysis. This latter work contributes to the emerging area of human-plant relations, the study of plants in the context of society, politics, and the production of health. Her research has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals including Social Science and Medicine, Critical Public Health, Food, Culture & Society, Gastronomica, Environmental Humanities and the Canadian Journal of Public Health. In 2021, she won an inaugural Gairdner Foundation Early Career Investigator Award and in 2020, her PhD thesis won the Joan Eakin Doctoral Award for Methodological Excellence from CQ.

From 2019-2024, Dr. Elton was an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University where she founded the Food Health Ecosystems Lab. She previously worked as a journalist, reporting on food and the environment, and wrote several books including two national bestsellers, titled Locavore and Consumed: Food for a Finite Planet.

Selected Publications

Elton, S. (2023). Eating for Two Trillion. Contexts, 22(2), 30–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/15365042231172462

Elton, S. (2023). The relational agency of plants in produce supply chains during COVID-19: “Mother nature takes her course.” Journal of Rural Studies, 98, 59–67. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2023.01.017

Elton, S. (2023). People-Plant mobilities: Growing bitter melon and bottle gourd in Toronto. In Food Mobilities: Making World Cuisines (pp. 78–92). University of Toronto Press.

Elton, S. (2019). Posthumanism Invited to Dinner: Exploring the Potential of a More-Than-Human Perspective in Food Studies. Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, 19(2), 6–15. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2019.19.2.6

Elton, S. (2021). Growing Methods: Developing a methodology for identifying plant agency and vegetal politics in the city. Environmental Humanities.

Elton, S. (2021). Relational health: Theorizing plants as health-supporting actors. Social Science & Medicine, 281, 114083. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114083

Elton, S. (2021). Intimate ecosystems: The microbiome and the ecological determinants of health. Canadian Journal of Public Health, 112, 1004–1007. https://doi.org/10.17269/s41997-021-00582-9

Elton, S. (2021). Is the ‘obesity crisis’ really the health crisis of the food system? The ecological determinants of health for food system change. Canadian Food Studies / La Revue Canadienne Des Études Sur l’alimentation, 8(1), Article 1. https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/447

Elton, S. (2018). Reconsidering the retail foodscape from a posthumanist and ecological determinants of health perspective: Wading out of the food swamp. Critical Public Health, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2018.1468870