Reframing Ideologies Through an Examination of Power and Privilege in a Critical Food Studies Course

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

Abstract

Elsemore et al. (2019) argue that colleges and universities might be positioned to play a “critical role” in the food justice movement, given the missions of many higher education institutions that seek to develop responsible, active and moral citizens . However, as Guthman (2008) has illustrated, a well-meaning food studies curriculum might not always be meaningful for marginalized communities. For example, in a study of her own students participating in alternative food projects, Guthman (2008) finds “that a set of practices that reflect whitened cultural histories are what animate [my] students” (p. 433), thereby reinforcing a narrative that marginalizes the histories and practices of people of color.
While writing about the importance of a critical food studies curriculum for another panel, I woefully realized that my own sustainable agriculture course was far from critical and could, in fact, be reproducing some of the issues Guthman (2008) saw in her studies. Though, I included a multidisciplinary approach considering history, race, and culture in addition to the natural and social sciences (LaCharite 2016), I did not attend to Agyeman’s argument that a reflective and questioning approach that “challenges undetected assumptions in ideologies and discourses” (Kato in Agyeman 2002, p.11) is necessary for real, just approaches.

According to Agyeman (2002), surface level reforms do little to target the dominant audience in ways that could ensure real change at the theoretical, institutional, and structural level of education for environmental change or sustainability. Further, Allen (2008) recommends that academics can tend to social justice issues more effectively if they “challenge standard ideological categories of inquiry and problem definition (p. 159)” and “design research projects that engage real people in their real lives (p. 160)”. In this vein, I reconceptualized my sustainable agriculture course into a course on food equity and empowerment that required students to work within the community addressing food access and reflecting on their own power and privilege throughout the course.
Similar to Lloro-Bidart and Sidwell’s (2019) findings from a critical food studies course that involved experiential learning and grappling with ethical dilemmas around food systems, final student reflections students indicated they shifted their way of thinking about their own belief systems and ideologies in the wake of understanding ethical dilemmas around food access. Additionally, working with what Lupinnaci and Happel-Parkins (2018) might call a food commons, students were able to see how community members supported each other in attaining food security. In many ways the students reflected what Lupinacci and Happel-Parkins (2015) suggest is the ability to “recognize, resist, and reconstitute” existing dominant food access structures. Ultimately, final student reflections illustrated a change of reference in students’ understanding of power and privilege and an increase in empathy towards others. To understand these impacts more fully, I reflect on the course structure and requirements as well as tensions within the course. Finally, I examine how the change of reference of beliefs and enhanced empathy might lead to more sustainable, and therefore just, actions and behaviors (D’Amato & Krasny, 2011; Arnocky & Stoink, 2010).

Author

• Olivia Aguilar, Mount Holyoke College