Collabinar: UC Berkeley Foodscape Mapping Project

Campus Foodscape Mapping as Justice-Oriented Critical Pedagogy, Activist Research, and Organizational Change

March 7, 2024
10:30 – 11:30 AM PST
Watch Recording

From 2015–2021 the UC Berkeley Foodscape Mapping Project used the University of California, Berkeley campus as a living laboratory for students, staff, and faculty to generate agri-food systems knowledge while developing programs, campaigns, and cartographic resources to advance justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI). The project was envisioned as a simultaneous critical pedagogy, activist research, and organizational change endeavor, yet in reality these principles at times pulled us in different directions. The Foodscape Mapping Project aimed to be non-hierarchical by recognizing undergraduate, masters’, and doctoral students as authoritative producers of knowledge and drawing on their own lived experiences to identify and inform the specific topics to be researched as well as methods of inquiry. Thus the project followed the various and changing interests of student team members and “hot spot” topics circulating in the campus community. 

However, while this catalyzed substantial learning for participants (see Fanshel & Iles, 2020, 2022), this meant we did not utilize the traditional social movement strategy of pursuing tightly focused campaign goals that might have led to more substantial long term organizational changes.

Questions discussed:

1. How can community and citizen scientists integrate critical pedagogy and activist research with organizational and social change goals?

Presenter

Rosalie Zdzienicka Fanshel is a doctoral candidate in the division of Society and Environment in the department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. They are broadly interested in the processes through which Historically White Land-Grant Universities envision, design, and enact—and inhibit—organizational change to improve anti-racist and decolonial outcomes in their agri-food systems education. Rosalie is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. They began their PhD after a 20-year career in food movement nonprofit work and service to the University of California, and was the staff program manager at the UC Berkeley Food Institute from 2014–2022.

About the Collabinar Series

The Center for Community and Citizen Science Collabinar events invite our partners from across the globe to bring us their most exciting challenges and opportunities in community and citizen science. Each event supports mutual learning, and advances projects and partnerships. To stay informed about upcoming Collabinars, please sign up here.