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Journal of the Cultural Studies Association

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Keyword: civic engagement

Introduction – Feeding the Civic Imagination

Kitchen utensils on a shelf.
Photo courtesy of William Parmley.
By Do Own (Donna) Kim, Sangita Shresthova and Paulina Lanz

Food is a powerful entry point into the civic imagination—i.e., the capacity to imagine alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions, the social process of which fosters a shared vision for collective action. As an essential material component of human life, food exists as an extremely mundane and dynamic aspect of our everyday personal and social experiences; our relationship with food is intertwined with issues of privilege, access, representation, language, ethnicity, and the materiality of culture. This forum explores diverse intersections between food and civic imagination, with topics ranging from shared memories, local (re-)imaginations, history and civic action, and private-public translations. The forum discusses how food sustains, nourishes, and connects individuals and their communities by delving into both their presence—e.g., acquiring and preparing ingredients, cooking meals, sharing or selling foods—and absence—e.g., hunger and human waste in food ecology. Articles in this collection demonstrate that the civic imagination is not only fed in dining rooms and kitchens but also in less conventionally thought-of contexts, such as digital spaces, toilets, and forums such as ours. They urge us to engage with food in new imaginative ways, fostering and bridging conversations: one cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like, and one must explore together to navigate and actualize the imaginative possibilities.

Categorized as Feeding the Civic Imagination, Issue 13.1 (Spring 2024)Tagged civic engagement, civic imagination, food

“Cooking in Someone Else’s Kitchen”: Exploring Food as a Commonplace for Antiracist Pedagogy, White Allyship, and Feeding Civic Imagination

Two trays of cookies shaped like hands in various colors
Photo courtesy of Jody Shipka.
By E. Vivian Leigh

Asao Inoue’s metaphor “cooking in someone else’s kitchen” provides a conceptual framework describing how white educators may navigate teaching topics outside of the subject positions they occupy. I apply an intentionally literal interpretation of Inoue’s metaphor, to position food culture as an important component of social justice pedagogy.
As post-secondary institutions prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, antiracist pedagogies have become a source of uneasiness for many white educators. Often, these educators may give excuses stemming from embodied positionality and fear of saying something wrong, which may become reasons to avoid difficult classroom conversations. As a result, universities lose opportunities to educate students about race-related issues, along with the potential for increased civic engagement. This paper addresses white teachers’ apprehension surrounding antiracist pedagogy and presents a food-themed writing course focused on how food has been weaponized historically, contributing to racial, class, and gender injustice—and how similar systems of oppression are still in effect currently. The course centers food as a commonplace to explore race, racism, and cultural difference—while helping teachers gain confidence in joining antiracist efforts.

Categorized as Feeding the Civic Imagination, Issue 13.1 (Spring 2024)Tagged anti-racism, civic engagement, food, pedagogy

Making Anyway: Education, Designing, Abolition

By Shana Agid

This essay aims to raise some provocations and questions about the practice of attempting to teach abolition in universities and colleges that are embracing the notion of the duty of the university to the “community,” and pursuing the deep institutionalization of “civic engagement” curricula and programs, all while offering the promise of an opportunity to “do good” (and do well – i.e., still get a job).

Categorized as Issue 3 (2014), TheoryTagged abolition, civic engagement, design, education, pedagogy, prison

Lateral is the peer-reviewed, open access journal of the Cultural Studies Association.

 

ISSN 2469-4053

 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC) License, unless otherwise noted.

Lateral
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Shana Agid: “what is it about the attempt, as an actor, to navigate not only opposing, but making as the response to that opposition, that throws us into motion, into relationships not of theoretical power, but of metaphors of relational force?”

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Meiner/Harkins: Our own response to the problem of “professionalization” is to mix the languages used across the spaces and modes of labor related to higher education programs inside prisons. This includes a blend of administrative, logical, and political rhetorics alongside various vernaculars produced by our experiences working within higher education programs in prison, institutions of higher education outside prison, and activist networks exposing and seeking to transform the connections between the prison and the University/college as institutions. These vernaculars include reference to efficiency and outcomes, academic disciplines, and the discourses surrounding the prison nation. We do this because the risk of “professional” publication on higher education programs inside prison is similar to those outlined at the outset of this section: higher education programs inside prisons supplement the failing University, offset its negligence specifically in the realm of alleged “criminality,” and displace criminality into service absorbed as value by the University. Publishing critique of this phenomena threatens to exacerbate the general problem of professional university critique. We don’t think this is a simple problem, and it does not have a simple solution.

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Shana Agid: Ours is now a design-led university. This term packages and codifies in our university identity (both in the philosophical sense and in the branded one) a kind of burgeoning confidence among designers, design education, and designing professions to both name and take on “wicked problems.”

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Sora Han: “We are hearing here abolition as a mode of being against social relations invested and investing in promises of sovereignty and self-possession. This object of abolition is not a form of self-possession “that could have” (including the capacity to eliminate anything) but in its unconditional vulnerability to, not simply the relations of material or symbolic possession, but also the very capacity to posses anything, it also becomes something with and in dispossession.”

David Stein: “Capital will not provide the necessary jobs for the current number of people, college graduates or not, unless it sees appropriate rates of profit in such an expenditure. As David Broderick, C.E.O. of U.S. Steel put it “U.S. Steel is in business to make profits, not to make steel.”[xiv] Or as the founder of the Apollo Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix put it: “This is a corporation…Coming here is not a rite of passage. We’re not trying to develop [students’] or go in for that ‘expand their minds’ bullshit.”

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David Stein: “…the cause of the crisis of daily subsistence and unemployment (which is a relatively recent phenomena for unemployed and under-employed college graduates whose skills and geography will not translate into jobs) then it is the universities that are seen as having failed to do their proper training;[xi] or worse, it is the students failing to appropriately assess which professions were in need of workers and choose an agenda of study accordingly…”

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Meiners and Harkin: “But to do this, we must run the risk of staking our claims, and naming some terms. For us greater specification, and more visibility, is key to moving college in prison programs from the interstices of institutional structure to a leverage point whose operation holds the potential to disrupt business as usual.”

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Sora Han: “Toward what does the “prison abolitionist” identity or identification strive? This is far from a simple question. For the history of abolitionism has never been fully present (the abolition of slavery, the abolition of Jim Crow, the abolition of apartheid). In this sense, abolition is an event that has yet to arrive. So, what is, or rather is there something, being affirmed in the identity or identification as a “prison abolitionist” today? How does one identify with something that, as such, has no precedent?”

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Sora Han: “The concept of torque…can be traced back to Archimedes, who’s famous (among many other things) for his spiral that twists surface and thus moves volume.  It strikes me that his spiral is a structure of (non)enclosed movement, but independent of human uses of the design, the law of the design is nondirective and infinite, in both movement and dependence on force — on torque.”

Gillian Harkins and Erica Mieners: “For us greater specification, and more visibility, is key to moving college in prison programs from the interstices of institutional structure to a leverage point whose operation holds the potential to disrupt business as usual.”

David Stein: “Commoning, in this sense, is the practice against enclosure: the insistent struggle for means of subsistence and survival, plentitude and freedom.”

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Shana Agid: we continue to make anyway, that making anyway is abolitionist practice in necessarily imperfect conditions.

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Sora Han: One thinks, interestingly, of all the pro se lawsuits filed by prisoners that ultimately were the reason for the passage of the Prison Litigation Reform Act. It wasn’t that prisoners were filing bad lawsuits as a concerted political tactic, but that they were in good faith filing lawsuits that because of their unprofessional expertise—or non-knowledge—produced pleadings that judges over and over again dismissed for “lack of legal merit.” That is, the elements of the pleading were not sufficiently met—in the language of the rules of federal civil procedure, they “failed to state a claim upon which relief can be granted”

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The “crisis” in the university is more accurately described as a transformation in the values associated with higher education, including a decreasing public stake in humanistic or arts education and increasing investment in job readiness and science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields across two and four year educational attainment levels.

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