A variety of approaches, including public and private food assistance and community-based models, are being used to address food insecurity. In this participatory project, I worked with representatives of a grocery cooperative and interviewed social services staff and low-income residents from the surrounding community in order to develop programming and policy suggestions for the coop that could make it more inclusive and affordable, thereby helping to increase community members' food security. In the process, I learned a great deal about the challenges faced by people with low incomes, their resourcefulness, the values that
How can we, as students and as researchers, scientists, and practitioners, challenge the academic paradigms that characterize conventional agriculture? How can we engage in agrifood system transformation in more inclusive and creative ways? We, the authors, are a group of students in the Graduate Program in Sustainable Agriculture (GPSA) at Iowa State University (ISU) whose experiences, coursework, and/or research fostered our passion for social justice in agrifood systems and who recognized a need to integrate social justice frameworks within our graduate program. Our working-group consisted of the authors and fellow students from GPSA who explored the connections between social justice and our sustainable agriculture studies and research from 2009 to 2012. 1 During this time period, we worked together to further integrate social justice as an analytical framework within our program curriculum by proposing a new thematic area, planning seminars, and developing social justice modules for inclusion in the program's core courses. This case study shares our vision, challenges, process, and lessons learned as part of an interdisciplinary student-led working group. We draw on information from a number of sources to explore the challenges and opportunities that we faced during this process. These sources include the GPSA's curriculum and learning outcomes; grant and curriculum proposals; feedback from faculty, staff, and allies; student evaluations; and self-evaluations of our work. The GPSA's openness to student-led initiatives, the interdisciplinary nature of the program, and the support of faculty members with decision-making power were important preconditions to the goals of our working-group's initiative. In order to ensure that social justice remained a component of our curriculum even after we graduated, we felt our student-led efforts should be institutionalized, and finding ways to do so presented a significant challenge. We hope our final outcomes will inspire scholars and practitioners involved in sustainable agriculture to rethink alternative processes to foster the "integration of the social, environmental, and economic dimensions of sustainability" (Smith, 2011, p. 2). By doing so, we not only address existing challenges but can better explore and imagine new solutions. 1 Two of the authors have already graduated and the other two authors are nearing graduation. 2 "Working group" refers to a group of students, including the authors, in the Graduate Program in Sustainable Agriculture who meet to discuss and find opportunities to integrate social justice within the program's curriculum. Quotes were taken from a reflective conversation among the authors about the process. 3 The School of Education (SOE) is housed within the College of Human Sciences (CHS) at Iowa State University (ISU). The Higher Education graduate program offers a Social Justice Certificate, and several GPSA students have completed the certificate requirements in addition to their degrees in Sustainable Agriculture. 4 Our work was further ...
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