Start Date
26-5-2026 11:30 AM
End Date
26-5-2026 11:45 AM
Description
The study of foodways has been embraced as a heuristic pedagogical tool in higher education, with courses such as “Taco Literacy” springing up on campus. Communication Studies, too, sees food as more than ingredients, creating a system of meaning, shaping identities, and helping people navigate and negotiate their daily lives. This presentation argues that experiential food studies pedagogies offer one example of how to foster civic engagement, part of the pedagogical core of the communication discipline. At a fraught time in public discourse, foodways pedagogies are needed urgently to help build civic knowledge that shapes views about public issues, increases trust, and lessens alienation from public life. Foodways techniques contextualize and vivify civic ideas, offering glimpses into community histories that influence the present. Foodways pedagogies help students make connections between themselves and their communities, helping move beyond differences to identify and address issues of public concern and increase civic engagement. Embracing foodways as one of the most basic and revealing social practices needed to help strengthen democracy, we are able to use food studies to show how civic engagement is about doing (self-efficacy), becoming (participation), and engaging (advocacy). After briefly presenting the state (or lack) of civic engagement in U.S college students, the presentation draws on the notion to conviviality to highlight three forms of curricular examples, contending that food studies pedagogies offer an important way to understand how meaning is constructed, how group identities and boundaries form, and how communities might craft meaningful, indeed necessary, civic engagement.
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Included in
“Good” Food and Crises in Civic Engagement: The Need for Foodways Pedagogies in Communication Studies Classrooms
The study of foodways has been embraced as a heuristic pedagogical tool in higher education, with courses such as “Taco Literacy” springing up on campus. Communication Studies, too, sees food as more than ingredients, creating a system of meaning, shaping identities, and helping people navigate and negotiate their daily lives. This presentation argues that experiential food studies pedagogies offer one example of how to foster civic engagement, part of the pedagogical core of the communication discipline. At a fraught time in public discourse, foodways pedagogies are needed urgently to help build civic knowledge that shapes views about public issues, increases trust, and lessens alienation from public life. Foodways techniques contextualize and vivify civic ideas, offering glimpses into community histories that influence the present. Foodways pedagogies help students make connections between themselves and their communities, helping move beyond differences to identify and address issues of public concern and increase civic engagement. Embracing foodways as one of the most basic and revealing social practices needed to help strengthen democracy, we are able to use food studies to show how civic engagement is about doing (self-efficacy), becoming (participation), and engaging (advocacy). After briefly presenting the state (or lack) of civic engagement in U.S college students, the presentation draws on the notion to conviviality to highlight three forms of curricular examples, contending that food studies pedagogies offer an important way to understand how meaning is constructed, how group identities and boundaries form, and how communities might craft meaningful, indeed necessary, civic engagement.