Challenges with Critical Race Studies within Food Research?
What has been your experience when telling your colleagues that you do anti-racist food justice work? How have those responded to you when you have told them, “I’m going Critical Race Theory” or “I look at how whiteness shapes people’s perceptions of food,” etc?
I am asking this because I continue to struggle with trying to explain my work to the status quo. I get defensiveness as well as outright aggression towards the work I am doing. I have mentioned several time that I get, “Race has no place in the study of veganism.”
What are your strategies for managing potentially hostile academic environments? Conferences? workshops?
What are your strategies as a grad student or professor in a department that doesn’t want to accept that anti-racism, decolonial theory, critical whiteness studies, etc NEED to be part of food studies (or other fields that these topics are ignored)?
These are just a few questions that are running through my mind and was hoping to get some brainstorming and storysharing…
