Learning to transgress: Creating transformative spaces in and beyond the classroom

Abstract

Our chapter is rooted in an interdisciplinary approach to understanding justice in food systems. We are all sociology students in or graduates of the Iowa State University Graduate Program in Sustainable Agriculture (ISU GPSA), the first graduate program in sustainable agriculture in the USA established in 2001 (Kirschenmann, The Networker, 9(2), 2004). The program offers graduate degrees in “the evaluation, analysis, design, and implementation of sustainable agricultural systems” (Delate, HortTechnology, 16(3), 2006: 445). The focus on sustainability and specifically sustainable agriculture offers promise that academia is engaging in pressing questions related to systemic change; however, we found that students and faculty often lack a language and the space to engage together in questions of justice, especially when these questions may be critical of existing dominant epistemological and philosophical approaches to questions of sustainability.