I chair the MSc in Resilient Farming and Food Systems at Wageningen University.
I also coordinate three courses:
The Politics of Food Systems Transformations
Food, Health and Society: An Integrated Socio-Political Perspective
Major Works in Social Sciences
I also contribute to different PhD courses, including:
- Critical Perspectives on Social Theory. Lecture on Foucault and governmentality
- Gender and Diversity in the Life Sciences Domains. Lecture on decolonization
- From topic to proposal: getting started. Lecture on creative methods
- Transformation research for sustainability challenges. Lecture on the politics of food systems and epistemic pluralism
About my teaching
Through my teaching I aim to foster a sense of wonder and curiosity while facilitating skills and knowledge uptake in alignment with the specific learning objectives of my courses. I work to find the sweet spot where students are challenged, and at times uncomfortable, yet still feel supported and motivated to learn and engage. Doing this means taking time to build trust and to model the kinds of behaviours I expect from them. It also means ensuring a strong foundation (i.e. a very clear structure and course logic) to support an open and deliberately fuzzy learning environment.
When it comes to designing my courses, I am against innovation for innovation sake. I do not make use of mobile phone polls as I work hard to keep my students off their phones. Instead, I introduce creative and interactive tools such as reflection journals, role-plays, serious games, and storytelling techniques along with more traditional lectures, tutorials and discussions to engage students.
My vision for education exists in parallel with my research vision. My teaching makes use food as an entry point to approach complex problems that can impact our lives and the lives of others. My teaching emphasizes the importance of explaining the socially embedded and political framings that inform, and are informed by, governance processes at multiple scales. As a teacher in political sociology, I emphasize emerging dynamics at the local, national, regional and global levels and consider how these shape people’s everyday practices. This multi-level approach is what I apply in my own research and this coherence allows for a translation of my own research cases into the classrooms in ways that can ground complex theoretical discussions while also engaging students.
My educational profile revolves around food policy and governance. My classes are appreciated by students from a range of disciplines (from Food Technology, to Resilient Farming and Food Systems, to International Development).
I have also received a number of awards for my teaching. With some of the award money I started a storytelling workshop series called The Diversity Chronicles. These workshops were free for faculty and students and aimed to help them improve communication skills while diversifying who talks about science and where we talk about it.
The workshops have now been taken over by the university and are provided to students throughout the year. Some stories have been adapted for One World Week in the form of a listening pod called Hear me out.
Food Governance 