Digesting ourselves and others through a critical pedagogy of food and race

Abstract

In recent years, there have been numerous calls for Geographers working in higher education to put into practice anti-racist pedagogies. Less well-developed is scholarship on the approaches which expand students’ understanding of race and the socio-spatial and material processes of their own racialization. Within the context of food geographies, visceral pedagogies have been useful for advancing student knowledge on the multi-scalar, dynamic and complex systems of power that influence what we eat. Bringing together insight from critical pedagogy, food geographies, and corporeal feminist understandings of race, in this paper I point to the effectiveness of experimental and embodied pedagogies which expand students’ emotional and cognitive learning about the relationship between race and everyday food practices. Drawing from narrative and interview data with primarily white undergraduate students in Colorado, USA, I argue that embodied, critical pedagogies contribute to anti-racist goals by destabilizing whiteness, linking students’ theoretical understandings of race to everyday practice, and building empathy for/with others. Furthermore, I point to the effectiveness of a variety of student reflection formats, from narrative writing, to sharing a meal, to empathetic listening, to argue for greater attention to not only what we teach in anti-racist pedagogy, but how we teach.