Life on the land: new lives for agrarian questions

Abstract

The politics of food, climate, energy, and the yet unfinished work of ending colonialism run square through questions of land. The classical agrarian question has taken on new forms, and a new intensity. We look at four dimensions of the agrarian question today: urbanization and labor; care and social reproduction; financialization and global food systems; and social movements. On this 50th anniversary of JPS, we as the journal's editors invite more research, vigorous debate, and scholar-activism on these issues in agrarian politics and beyond. We move into the journal's next era hoping we might continue to better interpret the world in order to change it..

Conscientisation and Communities of Compost: Rethinking management pedagogy in an age of climate crises

“…Following an initial visit to the community compost bins, we plan to invite students to reflect on their experiences by discussing how they feel about this practical experience of composting in subsequent seminars, then to consider if it has changed their perspectives in any way on food production processes, and their relations to, and with , Land. From this reflection on concrete experiences (see Freire, 2001: 44), we will then introduce LVC into these debates through the framing concepts of agroecology and food sovereignty; clearly contrasting this with existing processes of large-scale agricultural extractivism that tend to dominate supermarket food production processes (Shattuck et al, 2023), such as through mass monoculture soy production largely for animal feed (Heron et al, 2018).…”

“…Thus, demonstrating the potential for mismatches across different sets of relations. Crucial to the wider issues of caring for land differently – of which community composting is one example – are land relations (see Shattuck et al, 2023). Indeed, for Liboiron (2021), colonialism itself is rooted in ‘relationships characterized by conquest and genocide that grant colonialists and settlers ongoing state access to land and resources’ (p. 9).…”

“…Drawing on Styres and Zinga (2013), Liboiron distinguishes between two conceptions of land – Land as capitalised which, in the spirit of agroecology (Wezel et al, 2009), stresses interconnectedness, relationality and combined living with plants, air, water, humans and events; while land uncapitalised denotes land instead as a common universal (Liboiron, 2021). This latter conception of land serves to support dominant agricultural processes of expansion and extraction, which characterises large-scale monocultures that dominate contemporary corporate food production (Heron et al, 2018; McMichael, 2013; Shattuck et al, 2023). Conversely for Liboiron (2021: 45) Land is fundamentally relational.…”

The social reproduction of agrarian change: Feminist political economy and rural transformations in the global south. An introduction

“…Across all contributions analysed in this section, ‘the agrarian’ is represented as a contested space redesigned and reorganised by multiple processes challenging ‘old’ forms of agrarian life and/or where agricultural processes take place across expanded and flexible geographies of production and social reproduction, connecting states, regions, communities and even land and seas. As we learn about the processes of mobility, immobility, labour, circulation and extraction characterising these flexible agrarian spatial formations and life within them, we challenge the boundaries of classic questions of agrarian studies, and we move towards a further multiplication of agrarian questions, of capital (Oya, 2013) of labour (Bernstein, 2006), of national questions (Moyo et al, 2013), but also of gendered labour (Ossome & Naidu, 2021b), and of life and survival (Shattuck et al, 2023). Notably, this broadening of the horizon in agrarian studies to include the reproductive terrain and its gendered dynamics also contributes significantly to social reproduction theorisations and methods.…”

‘Land for my children’: Gendered moral economies, social reproduction and resistance against land grabs in rural Cambodia

“…By placing social reproduction at the centre of my analysis of moral economies of resistance, this article contributes to an emerging agenda in critical agrarian studies that emphasises care labour, reproductive work and the inordinate gendered expectations on women to perform such labour (Shattuck et al, 2023). In the study of global land grabbing, a social reproduction lens offers a broader conceptualisation of the overlapping dynamics that define land grabs-processes of extractivism, dispossession and accumulation.…”