Kitchen Table Pedagogy: A Three-way Conversation on Animating Knowing and Becoming for Health Justice

Abstract

The three of us (be)come together, yes on Zoom calls and in Google docs, and in a way that re-imagines the sitting together at a well-worn kitchen table to animate our current shared preoccupations. The table has seen many conversations before us, so it’s well-worn by feminist scholars who were also troubled, yearning, and adamant about leaving their marks. We have come to, become at, this type of table for centuries, sitting together preparing food, folding laundry, and washing up, all while also reckoning that our stories matter and can make a difference. In a context that is both practical and intellectual – centring fat liberation in public health nutrition – how do we remain good scholarly support to one another in and through challenging times? Times of dissent. Times of tedium. This chapter reveals the stories we need most now as we grapple with our places in the neoliberal university and public health pedagogy, specifically as a critique of policies that we read as non-liberatory. We grapple with how our complicity within these spaces might be considered from a place of mutual support and a shared commitment to unlearning and unsettling colonial ways of knowing, especially as we contemplate the problematics of public health imperatives regarding “intuitive eating” and health behaviour change. And we ask what this means for scholarship that is accountable to liberation, that is, personal survival and collective healing and learning.

Keywords

• decolonial pedagogy
• critical fat studies
• academic activism
• scholarly resistance
• feminist storytelling
• intuitive eating