Brown University Offering Pre-College Summer Program on the ‘Politics of Fatness’

Brown University Offering Pre-College Summer Program on the ‘Politics of Fatness’

Once again, an Ivy League school is allowing itself to look completely foolish. Do they even care?

Campus Reform reports:

Brown offers pre-college summer course on ’emerging academic field’ of Fat Studies

An Ivy League university in Rhode Island is offering a pre-college summer program on the “politics of fatness” in an effort to make students confront how they view “fatness.”

The Brown University course, titled “The F-Word: Examining the Science, Culture, and Politics of Fatness,” will take place over one week, from July 8-12, and will introduce students to “Fat Studies,” which the course page describes as an “emerging academic field.” The course is being offered as part of Brown’s pre-college programs, and the status for the class is marked as “closed,” indicating it is at full capacity.

The course will make students examine “the pathologization of fatness in the medical community and the rising prevalence of eating disorders, as well as how fatphobia intersects with other systems of oppression.”

“Ten years ago, you could hardly open a magazine without seeing an advertisement for a fad diet,” the course description reads. “Today, you can hardly open TikTok without seeing a self-proclaimed ‘body-positive’ influencer, with some even going as far as to call themselves ‘fat-positive.’ Despite these creators’ best efforts, the word ‘fat’ still holds an overwhelmingly negative connotation.”

The course will also focus on intersectionality, saying that students who finish the class will be able to “[a]pply major theoretical lenses to the study of fatness, including the feminist/gender lens, reader-response lens, historical lens, and race lens.”

The instructor for the course is listed as Victoria Lonardo, who, according to her LinkedIn profile, has been a pre-college course instructor at Brown since June 2022.

“The F-Word” is not the only pre-college program Lonardo is teaching this summer. She is also teaching a course called “Women and Leadership,” which invites high schoolers to study “concepts of gender, feminism, intersectionality, and inclusive leadership.”

The description promises that students who complete the course will have “[e]xamined emerging and transformative girls’ and women’s movements that have galvanized a new wave of female activism” and “[p]roposed strategies to facilitate inclusion and social justice for women.”

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.