Matthew Canfield is a cultural anthropologist with a background in socio-legal studies. His research sits at the intersection of human rights, global governance, and environmental politics, focusing on rights-based approaches to food systems.

His first book, Translating Food Sovereignty: Cultivating Justice in an Age of Transnational Governance, examines how transnational food sovereignty movements are transforming the meaning and practice of human rights in their struggle build more sustainable and equitable food systems. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with transnational activists based in the United States, the book illuminates the shifting politics of legal mobilization in the context of emerging networked forms of transnational governance.

His current research focuses on two areas. First, he investigates emerging norms and rights-based approaches to data governance in the context of food systems. He is the Principal Investigator of Data Governance for Sustainable and Equitable Food Systems (DIGIFOOD), an ERC-Consolidator funded project (2025-2030). The project examines emerging forms of agricultural data governance at the transnational level, with a specific focus on Kenya, India, and Colombia. This research has also received support from the Dutch Research Council (NWO Open Competition SSH XS Grant) and a Starters Grant from Leiden Law School. As part of this project, he co-coordinates the Ethnography of Digital Governance and Society Project (Edges Project) with Danielle Chevalier.

Second, he continues to do research on the shifting landscape of global food systems governance. He is particularly focused on the role of human rights in global food security governance, and the regulatory politics of advancing agroecology as a framework for food system transformation.

His research has been published in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, Law, Politics, and Society, Michigan Journal of Law and Society, Transnational Legal Theory, Public Culture, Development, Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, the Journal of Peasant Studies, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Working Paper Series, the Oxford Handbook of Law & Anthropology, and the Oxford Handbook on Transnational Law. He is also Associate Editor of the Political and Legal Anthropology Review and sites on the International Advisory Board of The Journal of Peasant Studies.

Before coming to the Van Vollenhoven Institute, Dr. Canfield was an Assistant Professor of Law, Politics, and Society at Drake University and a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Law at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He was also a visiting researcher in the Department of Law and Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at Australia National University.

He holds a BA in International Studies and Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University, an MA from the Institute for Law and Society at New York University, and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from New York University.

Activities