Addressing and Eliminating Unjust Food Enclosures: Resistance to the Carceral State of a Neoliberalized Public Good

• In Event: Critical Community-Based Research in Environmental Education

Abstract

Examining what educators, educational researchers, and policy makers can do when faced with unhealthy and culturally inappropriate school food, the authors of this paper share examples from case study research. Collectively the cases highlight what educators can learn from collaborative efforts to address food insecurity in places like Detroit, Michigan (e.g. Pothukuchi, 2011; White, 2010) where local food activists negotiate, contest, and confront the carceral state (Foucault, 2012; Miller, 2014; Moran, 2016) influencing what constitutes a ‘public good.’ The authors assert that access to healthy food, clean water, and clean air is not only unjustly monetized in a capitalist culture but they also maintain that solutions to social and environmental injustices too often stem from a neoliberalized ‘public good’ that further makes social justice and sustainability unlikely goals. From so called solutions like more choices at a big box stores to fully automated urban farms, places like Detroit are increasingly ground zero for how educational researchers can learn from and with local food activist-educator collaborations resisting such neoliberal hoodwinkings in favor of an anti-racist, feminist food sovereignty. Specifically, this paper outlines a framework that emerges from a food soveriegnty and anti-racist, feminist activist work in Detroit (White, 2010; 2011) in collaboration with ecocritical pedagogical efforts to connect young learners with the empowerment and embodiment of learning to produce, distribute, consume, and waste manage culturally relevant and healthy food (Lupinacci, 2017; Lupinacci & Happel-Parkins, 2018). From these efforts, the authors provide examples of how collaborative movements to recognize and resist food insecurity can spur educators to think about addressing important 21st century challenges and take action on matters such as food security and food enclosures in schools. Advocating that educators, and policy makers, rethink how it is they recognize and come to understand ‘food enclosures’ in Western industrial culture (Lupinacci & Happel-Parkins, 2018) together with critically examining the neoliberalization of what often constitutes a ‘public good,’ this paper pulls together research from a multi-site, ongoing research project from which the authors will focus primarily on illuminating the importance of working together to learn from and with radical food movements.

Authors

• John Joseph Lupinacci, Washington State University - Pullman

• Alison Happel-Parkins, The University of Memphis