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Towards Critical Environmental EducationToward an Interspecies Critical Food Systems Education: Exploring an Intersectional Cultural Humility Approach

Towards Critical Environmental Education: Toward an Interspecies Critical Food Systems Education:... [I open this article with a vignette from my childhood experiences of raising sheep with my family to foreground the cracks and ruptures of, on the one hand, theorizing eating animals as a sociocultural practice imbued with history, tradition, and identity and, on the other hand, theorizing eating animals as an exercise of cruelty and power. I show how this dialogue opens up critical questions about the convergences of theory and pedagogical practice in critical food systems education and animal-focused education. Farmed animal experiences are notably absent in much critical food studies and critical food systems education research, which tends to focus explicitly on cultural as well as social axes of difference. In contrast, some work from an animal advocacy or liberationist perspective does not significantly engage with questions about the cultural significance of eating animals or the social justice dimensions of animal agriculture. The rest of this chapter is thus guided by the following question: How do we, as critical food systems and critical animal-focused educators, navigate the tensions between conceptualizing eating animals as a cultural practice and eating animals as an act of power and violence? Although there are diverse theoretical approaches that might inform this pedagogical project, I develop an intersectional cultural humility approach, which embraces self-awareness, openness, and transcendence, as well as includes critical animal studies, ecofeminist, humane education, and race-conscious vegan perspectives. This approach explicitly resists prescriptivism, and instead seeks to explore possibilities for pedagogies that recognize the cultural significance of meat eating for diverse groups of people, acknowledge that racialized and low-income people are marginalized in food systems and do not necessarily have access to vegan/vegetarian diets, and yet also challenge the status quo of carnism to think about the possibilities of a more liberated human-animal politic. I work to not only bring a multi-optic vision to my own practice and pedagogy, but also to foster multi-optic visions within my students that embrace self-awareness, openness, and transcendence. To conclude, I draw out the implications of this research for the field of EE, particularly for scholars working in critical food systems education and/or animal-focused education.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Towards Critical Environmental EducationToward an Interspecies Critical Food Systems Education: Exploring an Intersectional Cultural Humility Approach

Part of the Critical Studies of Education Book Series (volume 14)
Editors: Gkiolmas, Aristotelis S.; Skordoulis, Constantine D.
Lloro, Teresa
Towards Critical Environmental Education — Nov 4, 2020
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References (52)

Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
ISBN
978-3-030-50608-7
Pages
145 –159
DOI
10.1007/978-3-030-50609-4_10
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[I open this article with a vignette from my childhood experiences of raising sheep with my family to foreground the cracks and ruptures of, on the one hand, theorizing eating animals as a sociocultural practice imbued with history, tradition, and identity and, on the other hand, theorizing eating animals as an exercise of cruelty and power. I show how this dialogue opens up critical questions about the convergences of theory and pedagogical practice in critical food systems education and animal-focused education. Farmed animal experiences are notably absent in much critical food studies and critical food systems education research, which tends to focus explicitly on cultural as well as social axes of difference. In contrast, some work from an animal advocacy or liberationist perspective does not significantly engage with questions about the cultural significance of eating animals or the social justice dimensions of animal agriculture. The rest of this chapter is thus guided by the following question: How do we, as critical food systems and critical animal-focused educators, navigate the tensions between conceptualizing eating animals as a cultural practice and eating animals as an act of power and violence? Although there are diverse theoretical approaches that might inform this pedagogical project, I develop an intersectional cultural humility approach, which embraces self-awareness, openness, and transcendence, as well as includes critical animal studies, ecofeminist, humane education, and race-conscious vegan perspectives. This approach explicitly resists prescriptivism, and instead seeks to explore possibilities for pedagogies that recognize the cultural significance of meat eating for diverse groups of people, acknowledge that racialized and low-income people are marginalized in food systems and do not necessarily have access to vegan/vegetarian diets, and yet also challenge the status quo of carnism to think about the possibilities of a more liberated human-animal politic. I work to not only bring a multi-optic vision to my own practice and pedagogy, but also to foster multi-optic visions within my students that embrace self-awareness, openness, and transcendence. To conclude, I draw out the implications of this research for the field of EE, particularly for scholars working in critical food systems education and/or animal-focused education.]

Published: Nov 4, 2020

Keywords: Critical food systems education; Cultural humility; Intersectionality; Food justice; Interspecies food justice; Animal-focused education; Self-awareness; Openness; Transcendence; Ecofeminism; Humane education; Race-conscious veganism; Black feminist theory

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