Ms. Farrah Jasmine Dingal

I study how extreme risks — disasters that disrupt more than 5% of global food output — compound and cascade across food systems and stress the institutions that govern them. I design scenario exercises to surface how risks to lifeline sectors travel across scales of governance.

This work increasingly draws me toward a question the technical framing can't answer on its own: how the limits of what we can imagine about catastrophic food system risk become the limits of how we govern it. I want to understand the coupling between institutional imaginability and governability — a direction that builds on my earlier research into how positionality and other normative commitments shape food systems research. This is as much a question for critical human geography as for risk analysis. It's the direction my work is now moving towards.

I have also contributed to national-level preparedness and response planning for extreme food system shocks, and co-authored research on seaweed as a resilient food solution and seaweed cultivation in global catastrophes. I hold a master's degree in Renewable Energy and Sustainability Systems from the Pennsylvania State University. Alongside my studies, I worked as a research assistant at Penn State's Costello Lab on ethics in agroecology and industrial ecology research, supported by a Rock Ethics Institute seed grant. I co-founded the World Food Forum's Philippine National Chapter, where I served as its Executive Director, building a national network of youth advocates for just food systems.

I am also a 2nd Dan black belt karate-ka with the Saudi and Philippine Karate Federations, a PADI Rescue Diver and Emergency First Responder, and a chef with the World Association of Chefs Societies and the Saudi Arabia Chefs Table Circle.