Jessica Barnes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment & Sustainability Program at the University of South Carolina. Her work focuses on the culture and politics of resource use and environmental change in the Middle East.  Dr Barnes’s publications include Cultivating the Nile: the everyday politics of water in Egypt (Duke University Press, 2014), Climate cultures: anthropological perspectives on climate change (co-edited with Michael R. Dove, Yale University Press, 2015), and articles in a number of peer-reviewed journals, including Critique of Anthropology, Social Studies of Science, and Geoforum. Her current project, funded by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, draws on ethnographic and archival work to examine food security in Egypt and the long-standing identification of security with self-sufficiency in wheat and bread.