Global Arts Language Arts Culture Tradition Indigenous Communities

Thursday, June 14, 2018

Course Description: Who Works for Your Food


Group 2
Title: Who Works For Your Food?  
Course Description:
Today, there are millions of refugees worldwide and thousands of migrants pouring into the U.S. Too often, these vulnerable groups become victims of human trafficking. This class will focus on the origins of food labor as a part of the trafficking business. We will examine the roles of consumers, social classes, and businesses play to support the practice. Our course will encourage students to think about who really creates our food farm to table. We will enter the topic through the cultural realm, thinking about how visual culture and the arts frame our understanding of trafficking.

Our course will consider questions like:

  1. What does it mean to have “fair trade” food?
  2. What does it mean for your food to be grown locally?
  3. Who picks your vegetables and fruits that aren’t grown locally?
  4. How does your identity affect the ways in which you understand the food industry?

4 comments:

  1. A nice, succinct description, group 2! Could you be more explicit about the global aspects involved in the course? As it is, the global is implied. It would be great if it is made even more transparent.

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  2. Hi! This is going to be a t-i-g-h-t course! I think it might be helpful to explain what you mean when you say human trafficking (I think that when people do know that term, they mostly only know it in relation to sexual slavery, and if they don't know it, it can be hard to make a good guess about what "trafficking" entails). Also, at the end, I was left wondering what you meant by "the cultural realm" and how you're going to use visual culture to explore trafficking. Maybe it's just me, but I was wondering if that meant that you're going to be exploring ads (print or TV/online) or marketing materials having to do with labor, or labor rights activism posters or anti-trafficking campaigns (or maybe all of the above)? It might help clarify things if you say something like, "We will approach the topic of human labor trafficking by looking at ________ and asking the following questions: ________"

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  3. I agree with Alex in regard to the term of human trafficking. I LOVE this idea of exploring where our food comes from. Thanks for shedding light on this topic!

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  4. So interesting! I think this is a fantastic opportunity to introduce students to these topics (esp. because many of them may not know much about it/ may have never heard of them). I am wondering if there are any specific regions/areas you will be focusing on? Food from certain global regions vs local regions?

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