(De)Colonization as a Frame of Reference for Exploring the Possibilities of School Meals in Educating for Viable Futures

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: School Food Politics for Social Justice, Human Rights, and Sustainability (Table 35)

Abstract

School meals are an integral component of education, providing space for learning and commensality, while also a major social justice issue in schools, as it is a means of social reproduction, oppression and resistance (Weaver-Hightower 2011). The privatizing and fast-food-izing of school meals can be seen as a colonization of food practices by market logic, embedded in ideas of the school meal as a private good. Our analysis draws on Lotz-Sisitka’s (2017) notion of (de)colonization as a frame of reference for exploring the possibilities of school meals in educating for viable futures, identifying both absences (colonizing practices) and emergences (possible openings and spaces for decolonization) in school meal programs and approaches. Lotz-Sisitka points out that while there is a strong need for transformative social theory and praxis when addressing issues such as educational inequality and sustainability, it is notoriously difficult to ‘frame the future’ in advance. It is, however, possible to analyze in a given practice, experience, or form of knowledge what exists as an absence, a tendency or possibility. Andreotti (2011) suggests that in order to understand (de)colonization in its different forms we need to examine the causal relationship between cultural/epistemic processes, relational/political possibilities (power) and material circumstances. The experiences we examine suggest a great variety in the epistemic processes shaping how school meals are understood, further, that school meals are rarely underpinned by educational purposes or considerations. This delimits how food and food practices can be understood and approached within education, when food should be considered “an integral component of the ecology of education – the broader interconnections, actors, relationships, conditions, and processes of which education is composed” (Weaver-Hightower 2011:16). We conclude that considering school meals as rooted in overall purposes of schooling, such as learning and caring, offers other relational possibilities and material circumstances than if, e.g., they are solely viewed as a means to improve children’s health status and behavior, i.e. as a single-purpose solution to health issues.

Authors

• Irene Torres, Fundacion Octaedro

• Monica Susanna Carlsson, Aarhus University