We are excited to announce that this will be a hybrid event with both in-person and Zoom options. We have secured ENV 120 for the in-person option. Can't attend in person? Join online via https://unt.zoom.us/j/83195512484.

Please join us for the next installment in the Philosophy Department colloquium series on Friday, October 29, at 3 pm, featuring Isabelle Bishop (Philosophy) and Christina Donaldson (Art Education). Their talk is titled "Cultivation + Nourishment: A Phenomenological Exploration of Food-Space."

Please find below an abstract for the talk and bios for both speakers. We hope to see you either in person or virtually on Friday!

Cultivation and Nourishment: A Phenomenological Exploration of Food Space

This presentation engages in a phenomenological exploration of urban agriculture and food cooperatives to illuminate the freedoms and restrictions granted to and impressed upon bodies through the material and incorporeal construction of food-spaces within industrialized, capitalist societies. We identify these societies as built upon the subordination and objectification of non-normative bodies along racial, class and sexed lines, and seek to identify how this objectification (Fanon, 1952; Young, 1990; Ahmed, 2006) is inscribed not only in the materiality of urban food-spaces but also through the incorporeal social relations that emerge from food and food practices within these physical places. Thus, we will regard "food-space" as the lived and material dimensions of food production, distribution, access, and consumption, and will examine how these spaces emerge to limit or extend bodily possibilities in urban communities. Guided by Merleau-Ponty's description of bodily style, this presentation seeks to probe the limits of his universalized understanding of bodily stylistics (Young, 1990) and pivots to focus on a recognition of and attentiveness to lived differences (Kruks, 2006) as quintessential for co-creating just urban food-spaces. Specifically, we explore community-centric food cooperatives like Detroit's Peoples Food Co-op and grassroots urban agriculture projects like Dallas' Bonton Farms as pathways of just transformation within urban food-space that prioritize cooperation, interconnection, accessibility, co-construction and re-regionalization (Jager, 1999; Merleau-Ponty, 2012). We advocate for a shift in conceptualizations of food-spaces from spaces of production and consumption to places for cultivation and nourishment and posit transformative pathways like cooperatives and urban agriculture as tools for the integration of difference. We ultimately provide a multi-dimensional dissection of food-space that renders visible the lived aspects of cultivation and nourishment as foundational for building equitable communities and, therefore, just societies.

Christina Donaldson is a designer, design researcher, and educator. She holds an MFA in Design from the University of North Texas and an MPSY from the University of Dallas. As an interdisciplinary scholar returning to UNT to pursue a PhD in Art Education, she is drawn to the interplay between design education, psychology, and sociology, and her current work examines resilience, mental health, and community.

Isabelle Bishop is a PhD student and teaching fellow in the Philosophy and Religion department at UNT. She is currently interested in investigating how Western political theory constructed the globalized industrial food system and how bodies and spaces are infected by its perpetuation. She also explores cooperative alternatives to capitalism and the power of food as a revolutionary tool.