Food: Radical Pedagogy and Care
Adapted from a talk for LA ESCUELA___'s decentralized symposium, Education as Resistance (2026)
At the intersection of documentary, participatory art, and radical pedagogy, I develop projects that grow from questions I carry into research, relationships, and collective imagination. Food is not only a meal but a container: it creates conditions for gathering and relationality that can only emerge through shared space and learning together.
This methodology takes different forms depending on context. In Carry for Historias, mobile kitchen carts travel across the Lower East Side, using shared recipes to gather oral histories; in in-home interviews, a shared meal opens space for testimonies that participants review and consent to before anything enters the archive.
In Future Food with Creative Time, I developed five public dinners drawing on two years of research, spending extensive time with abolitionists, formerly incarcerated people, Indigenous knowledge holders, migrants, NYCHA residents, and urban farmers, building relationships before creating each program. The meals were both the culmination of that research and a bridge to collective engagement, turning what might have been artist talks or panels into horizontal learning, where participants gathered around food as active collaborators rather than passive recipients. Each dinner explored food sovereignty, prison abolition, Indigenous land relations, or migration through the act of sharing a meal.
With the Institute for Public Architecture's Ecological Test Kitchen, I developed a living laboratory framework for metabolic architecture, asking how food systems, architecture, and climate justice intersect, and positioning design as a tool for ecological and social transformation.
These projects share core commitments: partnering with established organizations rather than arriving as an outside intervention; centering community agency through rigorous consent practices; refusing extraction by making sure documentation serves participants' own purposes; and treating the meal as pedagogy, where cooking, eating, and speaking become sites of knowledge production. The work addresses connected social and ecological issues: migration, labor precarity, food sovereignty, and land relations. The shared meal becomes a foundational method of pedagogical resistance.
This methodology takes different forms depending on context. In Carry for Historias, mobile kitchen carts travel across the Lower East Side, using shared recipes to gather oral histories; in in-home interviews, a shared meal opens space for testimonies that participants review and consent to before anything enters the archive.
In Future Food with Creative Time, I developed five public dinners drawing on two years of research, spending extensive time with abolitionists, formerly incarcerated people, Indigenous knowledge holders, migrants, NYCHA residents, and urban farmers, building relationships before creating each program. The meals were both the culmination of that research and a bridge to collective engagement, turning what might have been artist talks or panels into horizontal learning, where participants gathered around food as active collaborators rather than passive recipients. Each dinner explored food sovereignty, prison abolition, Indigenous land relations, or migration through the act of sharing a meal.
With the Institute for Public Architecture's Ecological Test Kitchen, I developed a living laboratory framework for metabolic architecture, asking how food systems, architecture, and climate justice intersect, and positioning design as a tool for ecological and social transformation.
These projects share core commitments: partnering with established organizations rather than arriving as an outside intervention; centering community agency through rigorous consent practices; refusing extraction by making sure documentation serves participants' own purposes; and treating the meal as pedagogy, where cooking, eating, and speaking become sites of knowledge production. The work addresses connected social and ecological issues: migration, labor precarity, food sovereignty, and land relations. The shared meal becomes a foundational method of pedagogical resistance.
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