Sustaining Sustenance: Engaging Food in community design collaboration

Food, today, presents us with a set of complex and interconnected social and material challenges that span disciplines, value systems, and institutional boundaries. This seminar takes these challenges as its theme, seeking to collaboratively explore potentials of food system work in and among the humanities, arts, and design disciplines.

A growing public awareness of the importance of food systems has connected with research in these disciplines to create new synergies that benefit from collaborative and publicly-engaged models of learning and research. Literary seminars, design studios, and art practices are engaging food as their subjects, and national events and funding initiatives are beginning to recognize the importance of connecting research scholarship in these areas with public efforts to improve our cultural food landscapes.

From new models of advancing food justice or alternative production-to-consumption chains to innovative research on urban food problems, localized food hubs, and the explosion of food policy councils and related initiatives, the health of our food and food systems has become an important and necessary topic of discussion.

The seminar’s facilitators have been involved in food system related, community-engaged teaching and research, connecting stakeholders in governmental, public-service, private, and academic communities through a critical and collaborative consideration of design agency. Working at the scales of, and between, Industrial, Architectural and Landscape design, the facilitators see engaged learning as a critical methodology to address food system concerns, and seek to engender a discussion about methods, project successes and failures, and results for communities both within and outside of the academy.

The seminar seeks participation from those who are directly working on food system issues; those who are working on related public scholarship and have discovered the significance of food system issues to their work; and those who seek to develop or advance their knowledge on projects and issues important to public engaged work on food systems.

Participants in this seminar are asked to share brief descriptions of their recent food-system related projects in advance of the Imagining America conference, highlighting both perceived successes and failures, and framed by one or two pressing questions that have been raised by the work. These materials will be reviewed by all participants prior to the conference in order to facilitate conversation, and to reinforce interconnections among the network of projects and artist/scholars.