Social Justice & Equity

Food, and the context surrounding it, frames much of our lives. Our culinary experiences are imbued with our physical, social, spiritual, and cultural identities. However, for many, food practices are alienating because certain culinary practices are privileged, while others are marginalized, especially in higher education spaces. Simply having access to safe and affirming food, drink, and dining spaces on campus and at off-campus events is a right that every student and faculty member should be able to enjoy. A Culinary Approach to Inclusion and Belonging in Higher Education is a new and innovative book that is unique in that it examines food as a social justice and inclusion issue. For some, religious traditions guide the consumption of only certain foods, accompanied by various periods of fasting and other important contexts around eating. Examples include the Jewish kashrut, a mandate on preparing and eating kosher food, and the Muslim halal and Ramadan, with daytime fasting. This extends off campus as well, to events and conferences that feature alcohol, which excludes those who choose or need to abstain. For those with medical conditions such as celiac disease (gluten-free), the absence of specific ingredients and foods is a medical necessity. For autistic students, or for queer and transgender people, the physical layout and social expectations of dining cause stress and isolation. International students lack a sense of belonging when the culinary decisions on a campus exclude familiar foods or settings, rendering a sense of invisibility for the students. Finally, we can look at Food Philosophy, how we think and what we believe about food, as similar to the field of Ethnic Studies, with an examination of who is included, excluded, and the need for transformation of the culinary system. Through its nine chapters, this book is designed to weave together explanatory material on various culinary needs with stories of challenges and successes in meeting the needs of those who live on, work on, or visit campuses. It highlights the need for identity-affirming culinary experiences that create a sense of inclusion and belonging. A Culinary Approach to Inclusion and Belonging in Higher Education is a great resource for researchers in cultural studies. In addition, it is an effective teaching tool for a variety of curriculum studies classes.Perfect for courses such as: Educational Leadership; Food Studies; Foundations of Education; Higher Education; Multicultural Education; Student Affairs

The New Henry Giroux Reader presents Henry Giroux’s evolving body of work. The book articulates a crucial shift in his analyses after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attack, when his writing took on more expansive articulations of power, politics, and pedagogy that addressed education and culture in forms that could no longer be contained via isolated reviews of media, schooling, or pedagogical practice. Instead, Giroux locates these discourses as a constellation of neoliberal influences on cultural practices, with education as the engine of their reproduction and their cessation. The New Henry Giroux Reader also takes up Giroux’s proclivity for using metaphors articulating death as the inevitable effect of neoliberalism and its invasion of cultural policy. Zombies, entropy, and violence permeate his work, coalescing around the central notion that market ideologies are anathema to human life. His early pieces signal an unnatural state of affairs seeping through the fabric of social life, and his work in cultural studies and public pedagogy signals the escalation of this unease across educative spaces. The next sections take up the fallout of 9/11 as an eruption of these horrific practices into all facets of human life, within traditional understandings of education and culture’s broader pedagogical imperatives. The book concludes with Giroux’s writings on education's vitalist capacity, demonstrating an unerring capacity for hope in the face of abject horror.Perfect for courses such as: History and Philosophy of Education, Political and Social Foundations of Education, Policy Issues in American Education, African American Education, Social Justice Research in Education, Marginality and the Politics of Resistance, Equity and Anti-Oppression, Cultural Studies and Public Pedagogy.