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T he occupational health nurse in a large manufacturing facility arrives at work early one Monday morning to find three ill employees in the clinic waiting room and a message from several plant supervisors that multiple employees have called in sick. The supervisors are concerned. The employees have reported similar symptoms, including nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and fever. Furthermore, two supervisors who rarely miss work have also called in sick and other employees are complaining of stomach cramps and diarrhea. The occupational health nurse promptly begins completing a nursing assessment and health history. She discovers that all sick employees attended the company picnic, catered by the facility's food service vendor, the day before. After notifying the local public health department, the occupational health nurse begins to investigate further.The occupational health nurse visits the cafeteria to speak with the manager and inquire about the food served at the picnic.The menu included ham and cheese sandwiches with mayonnaise, hamburgers, potato salad, and cake. The beverages were milk, non-bottled water, and lemonade. All leftover food was discarded, so nothing is available for testing. The manager mentions that yesterday was particularly hot, with a high of 93°F. He states the local health department conducts regular, stringent food inspections. However, he admits they have been short staffed recently and, although he tries to provide adequate training and oversee all food service operations, a few new employees worked at the company picnic. He also mentions his holding temperature logs are "not exactly up-to-date." While talking to the manager, the occupational health nurse notices one of the food service employees cutting raw vegetables on a wooden cutting board just used to cut raw chicken. The cutting board was wiped with a damp, visibly soiled sponge, rather than washed, after cutting the meat. It is abundantly clear that food safety training deficiencies exist in this food service.

Inspired by Paulo Freire, Mara Lugones, and other women of color coalitional feminists, this paper argues for coalitional pedagogy as an approach to teaching and learning about intersectional social justice. Such an approach seeks to decenter the teacher-as-leader model in favor of learning with as opposed to teaching for students (Freire); to remain committed to a problem-posing (Freire) approach that continuously asks the other question (Matsuda) and the bigger question (Morales); to embrace learning about each other as resistors (Lugones) as a necessary part of this mapping process; to provide space within the classroom for critical reflection on coalitional exercises so that students and teacher might embrace the relational transformation that results from this process; and to decenter the authority of canonical theory texts by inviting students to take part in the development of a primary text for the course through collaborative reflective journaling.

In Feminism in Coalition Liza Taylor examines how US women of color feminists’ coalitional politics provides an indispensable resource to contemporary political theory, feminist studies, and intersectional social justice activism. Taylor charts the theorization of coalition in the work of Bernice Johnson Reagon, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, the Combahee River Collective, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and others. For these activist-scholars, coalition is a dangerous struggle that emerges from a shared political commitment to undermining oppression and an emphasis on self-transformation. Taylor shows how their coalitional understandings of group politics, identity, consciousness, and scholarship have transformed how activists and theorists build alliances across race, class, gender, sexuality, faith, and ethnicity to tackle systems of domination. Their coalitional politics enrich current discussions surrounding the impetus and longevity of effective activism, present robust theoretical accounts of political subject formation and political consciousness, and demonstrate the promise of collective modes of scholarship. In this way, women of color feminists have been formulating solutions to long-standing problems in political theory. By illustrating coalition’s vitality to a variety of practical and philosophical interdisciplinary discussions, Taylor encourages us to rethink feminist and political theory.

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