Food Activism, Education, and Negotiating the Gendered Dynamics of Public Cultures of Care

• In Event: Caring for Social-Ecological Systems through Science, Engineering, and Environmental Education: Models, Tensions, Affordances
  In Structured Poster Session: Caring for Social-Ecological Systems Through Science, Engineering, and Environmental Education: Models, Tensions, Affordances

Abstract

Purpose/Theoretical Framework: Ethics and cultures of care have become an increasingly salient topic in the academy as scholars endeavor to resist neoliberal modes of commodification, marketization, and self-interest that dominate many contemporary systems of higher education and shape how we publish, teach and conduct service. Mountz et al. (2015) note, for example, “This means that slow scholarship cannot just be about making individual lives better, but also must be about re-making the university. Our call for slow scholarship is therefore about cultivating caring academic cultures and processes (p. 1238). In environmental education (EE), both Russell and Bell (1996) and Author (2017) have developed and theorized ethics of care, drawing on diverse strands of feminism. While Russell and Bell (1996) primarily focus on care for others, Authors (2017) turn attention toward self-care. They develop a feminist ethic self-care that acknowledges the roles of: (1) gender in doing care work; (2) other animals and the environment, who typically become absent referents in educational spaces; and (3) neoliberal systems and temporalities that structure education. In particular, Authors (2017) highlight that while self-care remains empirically underexplored and undertheorized, especially in EE, scholars must remain attuned to the ways in which neoliberal ideologies can easily co-opt understandings of self-care.

Methods and Data: In this paper, I draw on 18 months of feminist activist ethnographic work within an activist collective, the Pomona Community Farmer Alliance (PCFA), to explore and theorize the dynamic and gendered interplay between care for others and self-care. Comprised primarily of womxn from diverse backgrounds, the PCFA co-operates an urban farmers market, devoting itself to: (1) supporting farmers who grow produce with attention to environmental and human health; (2) creating space for knowledge sharing that emphasizes, health, wellbeing, nutrition, and food preparation, and uplifts the value of tradition and culture; and (3) cultivating awareness of intersecting social, food, and environmental justice issues to minimize and mitigate the negative impacts of oppressive systems.

Results/Significance: Invoking theories of feminist food activism (e.g., Steager, 2013), feminist food justice (e.g., Sachs & Patel-Campillo, 2014) and feminist ethics of care (e.g., Authors, 2017; Russell & Bell, 1996), I analyze fieldnotes and interview data to demonstrate how activist-educators negotiate the complexities of doing public care work while enacting or willfully subverting self-care. And finally, I enumerate how discourses of care for others (including other animals and the environment) and self-care intersect in specific, and at times, contentious ways.

Author

• Teresa Lloro, California State Polytechnic University - Pomona