Open meeting of the Sustainability Education Collective

In this meeting Associate Professor Ernesto Semán will first tell us about his teaching the history of food, and how he is embedding sustainability in his teaching. Following his presentation, there will be meeting for the members, old and new, of the Sustainability Education Collective. All are welcome!

The meeting will take place at the UiB Learning Arena at Nygårdsgaten 5, in the meeting room called Søndre Allmenning. Coffee, tea and something to eat is served before the meeting start. Welcome!

Ernesto Semán
Associate Professor of Latin American History
Department of Foreign Languages

Teaching the history of food. Learning the limits of sustainability 
A course on a history of Latin America through food allows students to engage with the crucial dimensions of the region’s past and present, from slavery to the Anthropocene. One of the main obvious pedagogical challenges in this course is how to turn “food” into a historical object beyond its initial and understandable attraction, how food is, and it will always be, more than food:  from old recipes of indigenous food to a study of the environmental strains that global demands puts on superfoods to the relation between agricultural production and national identities during the state-formation period.

Teaching these stories during a crucial point of the Anthropocene and paying attention to reflections and insights by students (most of them from a younger generation) helps to reconsider critical historical assumptions about periodizations; notions of race, class and gender; the consolidation of the global economy; the continuities and ruptures upon which the idea of “modernity” itself emerged; and the contested meanings embedded in the notion of “sustainability”.