Author Archives: Joost Jongerden

Standing in Solidarity with Palestinian Farmers in the Occupied West Bank

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This blog was written by Eleni, a student of Wageningen University who traveled to Palestine at the end of last year to support the olive harvest. In this blog, she reflects on her experiences and shares her thoughts on the responsibility of Wageningen University.

While media attention had been focused on the ongoing genocide in Gaza, media coverage has been minimal in covering increased Israeli military incursions and settler violence in the West Bank, which is home to nearly three million Palestinians. Many of them are being forcibly displaced either due to settler violence attacks or the demolition of their homes by Israeli military forces as part of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing plan of the West Bank.

With more than 500,000 Israelis illegally (under international law) living within the West Bank in settlements and outposts, Israeli settlers are encouraged to destroy Palestinian property, olive groves, and kill animals and civilians. This systematic violence is backed by the Israeli government and often occurs under military protection. I experienced a fragment of this violence during my stay in Palestine.

At the end of October 2025, I visited the West Bank together with my friend Claire. We volunteered at the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), a Palestinian agricultural organization affiliated with numerous international networks, among them the ‘La Via Campesina’ network. As volunteers, we joined UAWC’s annual olive harvest campaign called “BAQA” (بَقاء), meaning ‘to remain’ in Arabic—expressing steadfastness, rootedness, and resistance against the occupation and colonizer’s violence.

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Earthmoving: extractivism, war, and visuality in Nothern Kurdistan (book review)

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What does it mean to bear witness to colonial violence without reproducing the very extractive logics one seeks to critique? In Earthmoving: Extractivism, War, and Visuality in Northern Kurdistan, Eray Çaylı examines how landscapes, artistic practices, and academic work intersect with/intervene in histories of colonial violence, environmental destruction, and resistance. This review explores how the book challenges conventional approaches to testimony, memory, and scholarship, asking how we might relate differently to land, people, and the work of remembering.

Earthmoving: extractivism, war, and visuality in Nothern Kurdistan by Eray Çaylı, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2025, 199 pp., 65$ (hardback), ISBN 978-1-4773-3277-1

Read the full article here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01419870.2026.2640451

Reconstructing family after displacement: a case study of Yazidi motherhood in Iraq and the Netherlands.

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Mika Haugen

Since 2025 I have been working with the Rural Sociology department on a project about the labour and the wellbeing of workers in regenerative agriculture. My interest and passion around the topic of labour and rural development grew during my master’s in Cultural Anthropology at Leiden University in 2022. My topic was how Yazidis experience, practice, and construct motherhood and family while being displaced in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) and the Netherlands. I spent time with Yazidi families in asylum centres and homes in the Netherlands, as well as time with mothers in refugee camps in KRI. I looked at the division of labour in the household, changes in the perception around the role of mothers in Yazidi families, and how displacement has impacted family life.

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Gender, Social Reproduction and the Construction of Capabilities for Social Sustainability of Agriculture: A Relational Approach

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In a new article, Dawn Cheong and Bettina Bock argue that farmers’ capabilities, a core component of social sustainability, have been largely neglected in sustainable agriculture discourse. Using a relational approach to capabilities and autonomy, this study explores how women farmers translate the opportunity of agricultural innovation into their valued outcomes, and which factors shape their capabilities, in the context of Terai, Nepal, based on micro-focus group discussions (FGDs) and a survey. Whilst women have experienced a rapid expansion of their capacities and status as producers, their fixed status as providers of social reproduction hinders this expansion from being fully translated into valued outcomes. Gendered and intersectional personal, social and environmental conversion factors independently and co-constitutively shape these capability spaces. In this process, women navigate the demands of sustaining productive roles whilst maintaining the quality of social reproduction, often compromising their bodily, mental and intellectual replenishment and enduring cumulative reproductive health risks across their life courses. This implies that even when provided with the same opportunities, not all women farmers are able to translate them into desired outcomes. The lack of social and institutional interventions to redistribute and reorganise reproductive labour not only functions as a structural barrier preventing women from fully leveraging their productive capabilities but also risks compounding the depletion of women’s labour sustainability, overall well-being, and ultimately, the sustainability of agrarian society.

Read more: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sd.70817

Naar een nieuw landbouwsysteem

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Howard Koster (regeneratieve boer bij Biesterhof en medewerker bij RSO) spreekt in bij de Provinciale Staten van Gelderland. In zijn bijdrage houdt hij vooral een pleidooi voor een integrale visie op het landbouwbeleid. Daarbij benoemt hij concrete initiatieven die deze samenhangende aanpak in de praktijk brengen.