This Fall, a college in upstate New York will be offering a class exploring topics related to health and feminism, including a section on feminist nutrition.
Women’s Studies 362 “Topics in Feminist Health” will be offered as an upper-level women’s studies course at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in the fall semester. According to the course handbook, the class will introduce students to various topics related to “feminist health,” including nutrition and “political ecology.”
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“Possible topics include place and health, contaminated landscapes, the material/affective body, feminist nutrition, violence and displacement, and political ecologies of health,” the description reads. “Readings will draw from a variety of fields, including feminist science studies, geography, public health, social theory, cultural studies, and more.”
The class will be taught by Jessica Hayes-Conroy, an assistant professor in the women’s studies department at HWS, whose research has focused on various politically charged topics related to health, including “food activism” as well as “dietary decolonization.”
“My scholarship has focused on the intersection of food activism, bodily health, and socio-spatial difference,” her profile reads. “Trajectories and questions within this focus include an examination of the role that school garden and cooking gardens play in encouraging food-based social change, [as well as] an analysis of dietary decolonization as a strategy of nutrition intervention.”
While the existence of a course focused solely on feminist health may seem bizarre, HWS is not the first school to devote significant educational resources to examining a topic through the lens of feminism.
Last semester, the Dartmouth College library developed an entire online resource database focused on feminist geography, which, according to researchers, seeks “to understand the relationship between gender divisions and spatial divisions, and to challenge their supposed naturalness and legitimacy.”
[Related: Dartmouth College library features guide on ‘feminist geography’]
Additionally, the University of California-Davis recently announced the creation of a grant program for researchers to use “feminist approaches” in exploring various topics related to feminist health. Despite the fact that the UC Board of Regents had recently raised in-state student tuition by nearly $300 per student, the Feminist Research Institute at UC Davis was offering grants of up to $10,000 to research topics in this area.
[Also Read: UC Davis looking to award ‘Feminist researchers’ with $10,000 grants despite tuition hikes]
