A Place At The Table: A Feminist Analysis Of A University’s Curriculum Development In Partnership With A “Local Food” Non-Profit Organization

In this feminist ethnography, I returned to a small rural public Hispanic-serving university in the southwestern U.S. in order to critique how practices of inclusion and exclusion of stakeholders during the curriculum development process reproduce inherited privilege. I examined texts such as reports, emails, meeting notes, and student surveys, and I interviewed university personnel and community members active with the Local Foods Coalition who had been invited to advise on the new Food Studies major. These data revealed paternalistic neoliberal efficiency mindsets which perpetuated exclusion of minoritized peoples’ perspectives. I used feminist theory to describe and critique the power structures and their functions. This theoretical grounding enabled me to dive more deeply into neoliberalism as a framework for analysis of curriculum development in higher education.I focused on three elements of feminist theory (challenging authority, analyzing power structures and their reproduction, and naming paternalism) in order to develop a critique of neoliberalism in higher education curriculum development. I named neoliberal phenomena present in this curriculum development process, including deregulation of environmental and labor protections which benefit corporations, externalization of costs, efficiency mindsets, designing for standardization, privatization of what used to be public services, framing people as consumers, and commodification.