Learning Through Foodwork: Coalition Practices and Culinary Resistance in University Spaces

• In Event: Lessons from Organizing and Coalition Building for a More Just Future

Abstract

This paper explores how culinary food spaces on university campuses—such as community kitchens, student-led food coalitions, and cooking initiatives—serve as sites of informal adult education and coalition-building. Using a Global Political Economy framework and adult learning theories, this research examines how culinary placemaking fosters relational learning, cultural expression, and political solidarity beyond formal curricula. Foodwork transforms campus spaces into sites where marginalized identities, cultural knowledge, and collective action converge. Grounded in coalition ideology, these spaces model relational practices that resist neoliberal educational structures and support the reconstruction of universities as equitable, culturally affirming institutions. Cooking, sharing food, and organizing around food justice are practices of everyday pedagogy that build intersectional solidarity and challenge dominant narratives of exclusion. This paper argues that informal culinary spaces play a vital role in the social foundations of education, advancing visions of justice grounded in mutual aid, representation, and relational resilience.

Author

• Stephanie Chartrand, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) - University of Toronto