Sihk jó faahn meih a?: Collectivist Healing Wisdom Lineages Embedded in Asian Foods

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 3:20 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 4
  In Roundtable Session: Nourish and Heal: The Research of Food and Wellness (Table 6)

Abstract

In Asian culture, food is an embodied form of collective support and relational healing wisdom that can nourish the social, emotional, and spiritual needs of one’s body. Such a collectivist healing ethos that is tethered to Asian food culture is rooted in ancestral and intergenerational ways of knowing. However, educational environments are dominated by Eurocentric colonial positivist ideologies that erase and conflict with such collectivist wisdom.Rooted in the author’s lived experiences and those of her research collaborators, this chapter illuminates three areas of collectivist healing wisdom embedded in Asian foods: rest, resistance, and care. The chapter discusses the imaginative possibilities gleaned from Asian cultural food wisdoms that can nourish educators, students, and others in and beyond the academy.

Author

• Grace Poon Ghaffari, San Jose State University