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.
Decentering Food Pedagogies: Notes from our Gastrofeminist Classrooms
Meredith E. Abarca is the author of Voices in the Kitchen (2006, Texas A&M University Press), and is the co-editor of Rethinking Chicana/o Literature through Food (2013, Palgrave Macmillan) and Latin@s’ Presence in the Food Industry (2016, University of Arkansas Press). Her current project is El Paso Food Voices, an archive digital open source project, as well as the El Paso Food Voices podcast series.
Ishita Dey is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, South Asian University, Delhi. She works at the intersection of food, labor, and senses, and is working on a manuscript titled Sweet Excess.
Anna Romina Guevarra is a professor and the founding director of Global Asian Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. She is the author of the award-winning book Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers (2010, Rutgers University Press).
Dolly Kikon teaches in the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on political ecology, Indigeneity, resource extraction, food, and militarization in India.
Debarati Sen is a cultural anthropologist and author of the award-winning monograph Everyday Sustainability: Gender Justice and Fair Trade Tea in Darjeeling (2017, SUNY Press). She teaches courses at University of Houston on food studies, labor studies, gender studies, anthropological theory, and South Asia.
Meredith E. Abarca, Ishita Dey, Anna Romina Guevarra, Dolly Kikon, Debarati Sen; Decentering Food Pedagogies: Notes from our Gastrofeminist Classrooms. Gastronomica 1 August 2024; 24 (3): 8–18. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2024.24.3.8
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