We’re looking forward to meeting you all in…
We’re looking forward to meeting you all in Minneapolis next week, and to having a lively and educational seminar around our collective work. If you have not already read everyone’s original submission to the conference, please do so. We realize this is a very busy time at the beginning of our semesters, but having these background introductions out of the way before we meet will be a great way to hit the ground running.
The practices of eating, growing, storing, moving, marketing and disposing of food are fundamental in creating relationships between people, ecologies, technologies and places. Food is inherently multidisciplinary and because of its intimacy (everyone eats) it has become a nexus of increasing public attention focused on a range of critical issues. However, as we quickly begin to realize, our contemporary food systems are highly complex and often shape by multiple stakeholders and by very powerful interests. The „food movement‰ has emerged as a diverse collection of groups and interests seeking to change these system relationships at many different levels. Similarly the participants in this seminar bring together different disciplinary perspectives, critiques and purposes as well as different modes of engagement from policy to performance. At this important moment in the food movement, we have a great opportunity to reflect on the results, implications, and trajectories of some of our work done to date.
So, in preparation for next week, we would like each of you to reflect on the project(s) that you described in your seminar proposal, and make one post to the blog describing NOT the project, but rather four aspects of your engagement with it:
- your motivations for having done the work
- your expectations going into it
- your modes of engagement (how you conducted your public/engaged scholarship, for example: stakeholder sessions, focus groups, interviews, etc.)
- unforeseen implications or ramifications of the project.
Please organize your post according to these four topics. We will be taking all of your responses and graphically organizing them in time for our seminar discussion. It is our intention to use these as starting points for a discussion, with each of you highlighting your contribution briefly (for a minute or two), leaving the majority of the time for conversation about the food meta-system implications of our various efforts. How might we build on the discovery of unintended implications, unanticipated convergences, unmet expectations, or mutually reinforcing or conflicting modes of engagement as starting points for larger systemic engagements with our food systems? Or, at least, as provocations for the development of different practices for public scholarship?
Because we have only 90 minutes for our seminar at the conference, we would like to take care of some of the introductory business before we meet. Our primary goal for the seminar will be to look at our work as a microcosm of food system projects from the “10,000 foot” scale. A commonly used reference in systems thinking, this scalar viewpoint is intended NOT to be top-down, but rather directly engaged from a meta-perspective. In our work in interdisciplinary design, food systems, and engaged teaching, we continually discover an array of fantastic projects that often have significant unintended consequences as a result of their lack of this meta-thinking. If we do see our collective work as a microcosm of projects, and look at these from this 10,000 foot view, we hope to develop a conversation around some of the systems-level implications of our various projects.
Also, if you haven’t read Julie Guthman’s “Bringing Good Food to Others,” posted on the blog (and attached to this email,) please also read this before we meet. It offers a tremendously relevant frame to the way we hope to discuss food system/public scholarship issues during the seminar.
And, as requested in the August 19th post, if you have similarly inspiring sources that address the intersection of food systems, education and engagement, please take a moment to post them, or citations to them, for the rest of the group.
In order for us to have time to collect and organize your posts, PLEASE MAKE YOUR POST ONLINE BEFORE MIDNIGHT ON TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20TH (if possible).
See you next week,
Brian, Matt, and Kathleen.
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