DrRick Flowers

Rick is currently collaborating with Elaine Swan. Drawing on Ricks research on collective action and learning, and Elaines work on whiteness, gender and public pedagogies, they are developing a major research programme on food pedagogies. They use the term to explore the way that the growing, buying, preparing, cooking, tasting, eating and disposing of food have become the target of intensified pedagogical activity across a range of domains including cooking programs, social movements, activist films and public health education. In other words, no longer is it just your physical education and home economics teachers, and parents, who teach/preach what food is good for you, but there are now countless TV programs, advertisements, magazines, blogs, festivals, restaurants, supermarkets, growers markets and shops also teaching. Their research seeks to analyse the moral economy of constructions of learners, food knowledges, skills, expertises and how these are racialised, classed and gendered. In less than two years, Rick and Elaine have published four journal papers, and are editing a special issue on Food Pedagogies in the Australian Journal of Adult Learning to come out in November 2012, plus editing a book with Ashgate.

They are undertaking fieldwork in southwestern Sydney. The research is significant and innovative a number of different ways. First, this project focuses upon an under researched and under theorised food pedagogy: the ethnic food tour. There is important literature on culinary tourism and some of this discusses issues of race, ethnicity, class and gender. Second, the research is significant and innovative methodologically: we are using innovative research methods such as walking ethnography, and visceral fieldwork which can contribute to the field of food studies and adult education. Very little of this has attended to issues of race and ethnicity. Thirdly, much public pedagogy research stays at the level of media analysis and does not look at how pedagogies may be constructed by the teacher and received by the imagined learners. Fourthly, we are seeking to internationalise our research by undertaking cross-cultural comparison in order to understand the interface between state tourisms, multiculturalisms, histories and constructions of food, ethnicity and in particular, Asia and Asianness. Fifthly, we are bringing new methods and ideas of bodies and senses to the study of public pedagogy.

Ricks track record led to repeat invitations to lead action research projects in the fields of capacity building for the advocacy-oriented environment movement, grassroots community leadership initiatives, health promotion, and Aboriginal community development. His work has played an important role in raising the profile of popular education.

All of Ricks doctoral students focus on education for citizenship and community development and their settings traverse schools, technical and further education colleges, health promotion, community arts and democracy-building struggles in the face of dictatorships.