Transforming the Scale of Community Advocacy in the Movement for Food Justice

• In Event: 26.080 - Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: 26.080-11 - Advocacy and Activism in Varied Contexts for Learning

Abstract

Social movements are valuable sites for investigating learning because as part of them, people are challenging the structures that shape their lives. This paper investigates learning in the U.S. food justice movement. Specifically, we asked: How do actors develop the agency to transform the practices that shape their lives?
We found that: (1) Community advocacy took on new meaning as activists’ work shifted over time, space, and through social interaction and (2) Becoming a powerful community change agent involved developing new practices and moving into multiple networks of power, purpose, and privilege. Consequential learning transpired through coordination of ontogenetic and sociogenetic levels of activity, creating new forms of participation in relation to changing social structures with which to engage.

Authors

• A. Susan Jurow, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Leah Anne Teeters, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Molly Victoria Shea, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Samuel Severance, University of Colorado - Boulder