Food Studies Initiative: Lightning Presentations

Location

Zoom

Free

The USD Food Studies Initiative offers two "Lightning Presentations": informal 5-10 minute presentations from faculty involved in the Food Studies Initiative, discussed in a one-hour moderated session. Today's first Lightning Presentation will be offered by Julia Cantzler, PhD, who will introduce the work she's been doing with students in partnership with the Changemaker Hub around food advocacy on campus. They have established the Climate Alliance, a team of 15 students working on three projects related to food on campus (oatmilk as a default, education around factory farming, and partnership with the Zero Foodprint initiative). They are in the early stages of envisioning how this project can evolve into participatory action research around the topic of student-centered climate advocacy in higher education. Our second Lightning Presentation will be offered by Jennifer Prairie, PhD, who will provide an informal presentation on "Observing the Role of Sinking Marine Particles in Ocean Food Webs." Marine food resources play an enormous role in feeding our planet, with over 3 billion people relying on oceans for their livelihoods. 

The USD Food Studies Initiative (FSI) seeks to engage the entire USD community on urgent questions concerning food, generating a scientifically informed and justice-oriented approach to food on campus that aligns with all Six Pathways of USD’s strategic plan: serving as an anchor institution, supporting engaged scholarship, promoting changemaking, increasing access and inclusion, advocating for care for our common home, and exemplifying liberal arts in the 21^st century.

At the foundation of the FSI is a commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship that empowers community members to analyze and respond to racism, especially anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, colonialism, climate change, violence to animals, and the ways in which all these issues often intersect in questions of food justice and food sovereignty. The FSI will bring together longstanding faculty strengths at USD that utilize food as vehicle for science education, for advancing more ethical supply chains, and for socially engaged scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.  

Ultimately, the FSI wants to shape the USD campus into a model of how universities can leverage food scholarship and food services—including USD’s own food supply chains—to build community on and off campus and establish more engaged and ethical foodways.

The immediate goals of FSI leadership include (1) creating democratic and transparent processes to govern important areas of our work, like a curriculum committee that will develop a food studies minor, (2) executing a Speaker Series that will run through 2022 in partnership with the nonprofit Farm Forward, and (3) creating opportunities for USD students, staff, and faculty to raise their voices and get involved.

We encourage you to join our mailing list and add your name to the list of USD community members supporting FSI—which already includes 33 faculty and staff from more than a dozen departments across the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Business, and the School of Engineering, as well as leadership from Mulvaney Center for Community Awareness, The Changemaker Hub, and the Center for Inclusion and Diversity. To join, email FSI Program Manager John Millspaugh at jmillspaugh@sandiego.edu.