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Learning, Food, and Sustainability pp 221–237Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Learning to Transgress: Creating Transformative Spaces in and Beyond the Classroom

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Abstract

Our chapter is rooted in an interdisciplinary approach to understanding justice in food systems. We are all sociology students in or graduates of the Iowa State University Graduate Program in Sustainable Agriculture (ISU GPSA), the first graduate program in sustainable agriculture in the USA established in 2001 (Kirschenmann, The Networker, 9(2), 2004). The program offers graduate degrees in “the evaluation, analysis, design, and implementation of sustainable agricultural systems” (Delate, HortTechnology, 16(3), 2006: 445). The focus on sustainability and specifically sustainable agriculture offers promise that academia is engaging in pressing questions related to systemic change; however, we found that students and faculty often lack a language and the space to engage together in questions of justice, especially when these questions may be critical of existing dominant epistemological and philosophical approaches to questions of sustainability.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The Iowa Board of Regents is a group of nine citizens appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Iowa Senate to govern Iowa’s five public educational institutions (Board of Regents, n.d.). At the time, Rastetter was President Pro Tem, or “pro tempore,” the board member who acts as president in absence of the board’s president. Rastetter is now the president of the Board of Regents.

  2. 2.

    The Farm Crisis occurred during the 1980s in the USA and describes an economic recession that, for agricultural communities, was worse than the Great Depression.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Welfare, Augustana College, Rock Island, IL, USA

    Angie Carter

  2. Facultad de Economía, Universidad de Colima, Villa de Álvarez, Colima, México

    Claudia M. Prado-Meza

  3. Global Greens, Lutheran Services of Iowa, Des Moines, IA, USA

    Jessica Soulis

Authors
  1. Angie Carter
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  2. Claudia M. Prado-Meza
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  3. Jessica Soulis
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Jennifer Sumner

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Carter, A., Prado-Meza, C.M., Soulis, J. (2016). Learning to Transgress: Creating Transformative Spaces in and Beyond the Classroom. In: Sumner, J. (eds) Learning, Food, and Sustainability. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53904-5_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53904-5_12

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