Thinking/learning about policy to enact different food futures

Abstract

AbstractThis paper discusses the political potential of co‐learning in post‐graduate classrooms. It examines the linkages between pedagogy and policy critique in the context of a post‐graduate course on the political and moral economy of food at The University of Auckland. The paper uses the example of teaching about an influential policy linking regional development and agricultural research to suggest that post‐structural insights can shed new light on the political potential of classrooms. If we treat both social science and learning as relational fields that are as much about what might and ought to be brought into being as they are sites and moments for describing or representing social reality, then performing them becomes potentially transformative. In this paper I ask what might be gained by performing economic policy critique creatively in the classroom whilst also learning from it as a site in which the world is enacted. The aim is to generate insights into how we might enact the world differently if we attend to a reflexive study of the process of critique at the same time as making that critique.