Description
Date and Time: Tuesday & Wednesday, 25th and 26th March 2025, 9.30am–4:00pm
Venue: The Hall, St Mary of Eton Church, Eastway, Hackney Wick, London, E9 5JA
Cost: £400 (includes lunch and refreshments)
This session, which assumes no prior knowledge of the topic, considers what we mean by coloniality and an anti-colonial approach. We will explore why deepening our understanding of the field is relevant to health justice/equity and practice interrupting and replacing colonial logic.
We will also consider coloniality more specifically in relation to nutrition practice and education. This section is taught through two participatory activities that learners can then use themselves. The first activity is a card game on vitamins and minerals designed for small to medium sized community groups. (Cards available on the day by donation). The second activity, focused on milk, is suitable for small to large workshops. It demonstrates how to draw on learner’s existing knowledge and interests to surface taken-for-granted (colonial) assumptions in healthy eating messages and shows how to help people reframe and reconsider existing belief. The interactive teaching style means content is strongly informed by learners, making it suitable to use with groups that come together over a diverse range of interests in food and who may have different backgrounds. The activity models how to be respectful of many knowledge systems while working within a professional scope credentialed through biomedicine, and how to hold space for conflicting views while fostering meaningful learning and healing for all.
Discussing coloniality raises issues about the role that ethical frameworks, and norms in knowledge-creation, play in maintaining or disrupting and transforming the status quo. We will consider concepts aligned with anti-colonial ethics including distributive justice and epistemic justice.
By the end of the course learners will be able to:
• Identify what is meant by coloniality
• Understand how an anti-colonial approach is relevant to health justice/equity
• Recognise the characteristics of coloniality and be able to interrupt and replace these with anti-oppressive practices
• Set-up a learning space so it is trauma-aware and disability-inclusive
• Deliver community nutrition education on vitamins and minerals from an anti-colonial perspective
• Facilitate a workshop exploring and challenging coloniality in healthy eating messages
• Recognise the need for food ethics to expand beyond an individualistic (colonial) biomedical framework to consider issues of social justice including norms in knowledge-creation
