Critical food systems pedagogy, polycrisis, and the reactionary moment with Michael Classens
When and Where
Speakers
Description
Join us on Tuesday, November 26th, 2024, from 12:30 - 2:00 pm in-person in the Forestry Boardroom (33 Willcocks St, Suite 1016 [main floor]) or online for Critical food systems pedagogy, polycrisis, and the reactionary moment! Hear from Michael Classens, an Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, and Undergraduate Associate Director in the School of the Environment at The University of Toronto
Zoom details
https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/83919695327
Meeting ID: 839 1969 5327
Passcode: 167114
Seminar Abstract
Over the past decade critical food systems educators have reckoned with reimagining conventional approaches to teaching about food and agriculture. Originally conceived as a project to address the socio-ecological destruction implicit to the colonial, capital-intensive, industrialized food system, critical food systems educators are now faced with additional challenges: the realities of a destabilizing global polycrisis and the mainstreaming of a reactionary politics targeting higher education ever-more directly. This assemblage threatens to destabilize the social, cultural, and material conditions within which critical pedagogy is deployed and reproduced.
In this talk I reflect on how critical food systems pedagogy might be strengthened by more explicitly engaging with the global polycrisis and challenging hierarchies of power that antagonize the pursuit of transformative education practice. I discuss this through a constellation of interconnected pedagogical concepts – praxis; the dialectic between formal and nonformal learning, and, socio-ecological transformation. I draw on several examples from my recent teaching and research activities to illustrate how I attempt to co-contribute to a critical food systems pedagogy equipped to respond to the many challenges of the contemporary moment.
Speaker Biography
Michael is Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, and Undergraduate Associate Director in the School of the Environment at The University of Toronto. He earned his PhD from York University where his thesis focussed on socio-ecological transformation via local food production, themes on which he elaborates in his book, From Dismal Swamp to Smiling Farms: Food, Agriculture and Change in the Holland Marsh (UBC Press, 2021). Michael regularly publishes on sustainability, socio-ecological justice, and critical food systems pedagogy. In his courses, he specializes in community-based learning, nonformal learning outside the classroom, and praxis-based pedagogy.