Course Description

COMM 497AO: Gender, Bread, and Online Social Movements
(Fall 2013)
Food is never simply matter to fill the belly– politics, power, identity and culture are inseparable from our understandings of its rather basic function—as necessity for survival. We communicate through food all the meanings we assign and attribute to culture (space, home, memory) and thus, to identity. This course brings together the various ways gendered identities are taken up and embodied in online and offline environments with efforts to build community, social justice and social change. The course bridges academic research on gender, food, culture and communication with community-based learning and research. Through a focus on the BREAD Movement (Bridging Resources for Ecological and Art-Based Development) the course will build on feminist methodologies and the use of digital technologies towards participation in the Bread Houses Network (www.breadhousesnetwork.org) and working with a Bread House in the Pioneer Valley. In this course, students will engage dialectically in a community organizing effort that relies heavily both on embodied and collective practices (bread making) and on seemingly disembodied digital technologies toward the participation in a global BREAD network. In connecting these two practices, this course will explore the ways in which gender and community inform and are trans-formed in the production and consumption of food, as well as in participatory approaches to social justice.
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To learn more, e-mail us or view the syllabus page. Knead on!

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