Taught By:
Zulfiya Tursunova
Associate Professor
Peace and Conflict Studies
Guilford College
tursunovaz@guilford.edu
Read profile here.
Course Description:
The course aims to explore concepts of food justice and social action that are embedded in food security and food sovereignty. The paradigm of food sovereignty reinforces the right of peoples to healthy and culturally-appropriate food produced through ecologically sustainable methods, and their right to determine their own food and agricultural systems. The heart of this paradigm is to reclaim decision-making power in the food system and represent authentic food sovereignty. This course examines problems of maldevelopment, agricultural system production, its changing structure and its impact on labor, family structure, household dynamics, gender relations, changing identities of femininities and masculinities, migration, and rural development. Community food sovereignty is vital in examining the food systems’ geography, its production, distribution, consumption, power relations, access, and equity at local, regional, and global levels. History, laws and regulations, demography, environment, trade, and market domains that may enhance and/or reduce people’s choices and opportunities influence food systems. We will examine small, medium, and large-scale industrial farming, Indigenous knowledge systems, cultural food practices, health, food insecurity, livestock production, economics and globalization, poverty, and community gardening.
Student Campaigns:
What is unique about this course is that students will design their social action through the lenses of critical race and social change theories considering power, gender, ethnicity, race, age, generation, class, social status, marital status, household status, and location (rural/urban, center/periphery). Students learn about the food systems, and theories of social change as well as choose and lead their own campaigns by de6ning a social problem, developing concrete, quanti6able solutions (i.e., demands) and applying it. A milestone of the social action campaign is that students will have an opportunity to enact policy (rule, norm, or practice of an institution) on campus or in the community.
The course applies interdisciplinary lenses through the integration of concepts derived from peace and justice, feminist, development, geography, political ecology, sociology, ecosystem science, and food and nutritional ecology studies.