Decentering Food Pedagogies

Abstract

In this collaborative essay, five gastrofeminists from various disciplines, mainly literature, anthropology, sociology, ethnic studies, and diverse locations of Global South and Global North, share four collaborative experiments built around two axioms: to integrate experiences of students as gendered and racialized subjects in their experiential learning irrespective of disciplinary boundaries, and to integrate critical feminist scholarship that destabilizes ethnocentric notions around consumption, production, and distribution of food. Through the four collaborative experiments: students’ food voice, autobiographies, collective kusina, and food walks, the pedagogues bring embodied lived experience in conversation with critical pedagogy, expanding some of the foundational ideas of feminist pedagogy, especially of not treating theory, research, and experience as independent silos. Each of these collaborative experiments calls for a need to create dialogic space through a collaborative co-learning process and offers a decolonial reading of texts through recognizing the difference and diversity of our classrooms.