Young people who navigate intersecting racial, ethnic, economic, and/or geographic oppressions are often the objects of food pedagogy. Citing childhood obesity and anthropogenic environmental change, food pedagogies in the United States especially target Black/African-American youth, among other youth of color. Meanwhile, teaching and learning about food is on the rise in myriad settings, often in ways that reproduce binaries between “healthy” and “unhealthy” and “good” and “bad” foods. Grounded in hegemonic nutrition and bolstered by healthism, predominant food pedagogies perpetuate racialized assumptions about food and health. In the context of the Anthropocene as discourse and epoch, food pedagogy is likely to intensify, while climate change holds concerning implications for Black Americans. Critical and embodied approaches to food pedagogy are necessary, I argue, to address power relations and to cultivate community-led resilience. Building on Black geographies, critical food studies, and food pedagogies, I explore the possibilities of a critical and embodied pedagogy with Black American youth. I reflect on a “Favorite Meals” workshop carried out as part of an urban farm youth program in Austin, Texas, USA. Both the practice of the workshop and youth responses counter food binaries while highlighting pleasure, play, and knowledge—all of which remain underconsidered in food-related studies and pedagogy with young people. Given concerns about childhood obesity and the global scope of the Anthropocene, this article is relevant to food pedagogy with historically marginalized youth across national contexts.
This editorial takes the form of a dialogue between the editors of this Themed Intervention on Black intimate geographies. It frames the voices of the Black geographers from the USA and the UK assembled here as speaking to both the incontournability of anti‐blackness as a political reality and to Black ways of knowing, imagining, and dreaming our presents and our futures against and beyond resistance to anti‐blackness. The editorial celebrates the diasporic collaboration on which this Intervention is grounded and points to the possibilities of Black life and knowledge production.
Race is sewn into the very fabric of advertising, yet it remains largely absent from the practice of advertising pedagogy and from scholarship on teaching advertising. Indeed, most students begin their professional career without earnestly considering the significance of race, particularly their own, in relation to how advertising is coordinated, implemented, and received. As consumer markets continue to become more racially diverse, the relationship between race and advertising is sure to evolve—increasing in complexity and nuance. In order for the next generation of advertising practitioners to be adequately prepared for the future that awaits, advertising educators need to deepen their commitment to purposefully exploring race/racism and advertising with students. In this article, we highlight how a focus on critical reflexivity supports meaningful and lasting learning around race, racism, and advertising. Based on co-teaching an advertising and food justice course together since 2012, we outline a critical paradigm and four practices we use to foster critical reflexivity: acknowledging shared inheritance of racism, critical storytelling, deep listening, and kitchen table talk. In closing, we highlight considerations and challenges that often accompany teaching about race and racism, as well as the importance of self-care and debriefing for instructors. Throughout, we offer tools for cultivating a reflexive classroom that engages deeply and directly with issues of race and racism.
If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic. I suppose I could dispense with the last four if I were not so deadly serious about fidelity to the milieu out of which I write and in which my ancestors actually lived.
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