Category Archives: Research

Research

Virtual Issue Sociologia Ruralis – a tribute to the Year of the Family Farm

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Being editor of Sociologia Ruralis I’m pleased to announce the publication of a Virtual Issue on Family Farming (= free accessible at Wiley Online Library) to celebrate the UN International Year on Family Farming, which reflects the development of thinking on family farming during the years. The virtual issue gathers a selection of publications on family farming in Sociologia Ruralis between 1969 and 2013. Taken together they reflect the development of thought through continuously returning questions (survival, succession, gender) as well as shifting points of attention.

Articles included:

  1. Social implications of farm mechanization, a final report on cross national research by Anton J. Jansen
  2. Patriarchy and Property by Harriet Friedman
  3. Family Goals and Survival Strategies by David Symes and John Appleton
  4. The Persistence of Family Farms in United States Agriculture by  Nola Reinhardt and Peggy Bartlett
  5. Farm Families Between Tradition and Modernity by Karl Friedrich Bohler and Bruno Hildenbrand
  6. Ageing and Succession of Family Fams: The Impact on Decision-making and Land Use by  Clive Potter and Matt Lobley
  7. Power Analysis and Farm Wives by Sally Shortall
  8. Defining and Operationalizing Family Farming from a Sociological Perspective by Göran Djurfeldt
  9. Family Farming and Capitalist Development in Greek Agriculture: A Critical Review of the Literature by Charalambos Kasimis and Apostolos G. Papadopoulos
  10. Pluriactivity as a Livelihood Strategy in Irish Farm Households and its Role in Rural Development by Jim Kinsella, Susan Wilson, Floor De Jong and Henk Renting
  11. Gender Identity in European Family Farming: A Literature Review by Berit Brandth
  12. ‘Good Farmers’ as Reflexive Producers: an Examination of Family Organic Farmers in the US Midwest by Paul Stock
  13. Subsistence and Sustainability in Post-industrial Europe: The Politics of Small-scale Farming in Europeanising Lithuania by Diana Mincyte
  14. Peasantry and Entrepreneurship As Frames for Farming: Reflections on Farmers’ Values and Agricultural Policy Discourses by Miira Niska, Hannu T. Vesala and Kari Mikko Vesala
  15. Resourcing Children in a Changing Rural Context: Fathering and Farm Succession in Two Generations of Farmers by Berit Brandth and Grete Overrein

The last issue of Sociologia Ruralis later this year will also include a section with several articles on family farming, followed by a discussion between some of the authors about the advancements made early 2015.

Special Issue on Cooperatives and Alternative Food Systems Initiatives – Free in July

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A special issue of the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development (JAFSCD) on Cooperatives and Alternative Food Systems Initiatives has just been completed and will be freely available — no subscription needed! — through the month of July. http://www.agdevjournal.com/volume-4-issue-3.html We are doing this to make these papers more readily available to researchers and practitioners. It also offers prospective subscribers a chance to explore the contents of JAFSCD. I encourage you to share this notice with your colleagues and networks.

The Special Issue: 

Working Together to Build Cooperative Food Systems

Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems and Community Development 4(3)
Edited by:  Anderson, C.R., Brushett, L., Renting, H. and T. Gray
A recent emphasis on cooperation and innovative forms of collective action within the food movement invokes a community-centered approach to food provisioning where collective problem solving and democracy take centre place in the development agenda. Cooperative alternative food networks are becoming powerful tools for community development and Continue reading →

Key research articles on Sociology Research

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Sociology Research alerts the social science community to the latest journal articles considered to represent the best in sociology research. See: www.sociologyresearch.org. Sociology Research is viewed over 14,000 times per month and has an audience of academics and researchers from a growing number of the top 20 major academic institutions.
An article that had been published recently is: “Exploring the ‘New Rural Paradigm’ in Europe: Eco-economic strategies as a counterforce to the global competitiveness agenda”. This article describes strategies in rural regional development. For many regions an obvious choice is to compete with other regions for global mobile capital and labour. On the other hand, and as a counterforce to these global logics, new strategies, which are more place-based, are being developed, such as the construction of identities or images around new agricultural goods and services. The full article has been published in the journal European Urban and Regional Studies.

“Our culture is being eroded”: 2nd report from the field

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Florian Neubauer is working on an M.Sc. Thesis with RSO titled `Understanding changes in land tenure and livelihoods among the pastoral Maasai in southern Kenya´. Here he shares some reflections from his field work. All quotations are either taken from interviews or from informal conversations. Florian’s first post can be found here.

Part 2: Maasai culture

 

Still what it is all about? – Maasai cattle

Still what it is all about? – Maasai cattle

 

`We don’t have something like that here anymore´

He slants his head, looks at me and smiles. I don’t know what he is thinking. Is he reminiscing? Does he feel sorry to disappoint me? Or, is he amused by the naivety of the mzungu, the `white´? `We don´t have something like that here anymore´, he says after some time. I am sitting in the homestead of an old Maasai man, having a cup of tea with him. I am somewhere in the remote area of Kajiado County in southern Kenya at the very Continue reading →

Research Dispatches: Karibu mzungu!

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This post is the first of three reports  by RSO student Florian Neubauer about the MSc research he is conducting in Kenya. Florian has kindly agreed to blog about his research and to provide us with a review of :

  1.  First reflections on researching in Kenya and his host institution, Maasai Mara University.
  2.  Living among the Maasai with a focus on their culture and way of living.
  3.  Results of the thesis. 
Main entrance of Maasai Mara University with the student library in the background.

Main entrance of Maasai Mara University with the student library in the background.

Part 1: Introduction and Maasai Mara University (MMU)

`Karibu´ and ´karibu mzungu` – `Welcome´ or `welcome white person´ – are probably two of the most frequent sentences, I have heard here, since I arrived in Kenya around three weeks ago. Here in the south of the country, I am conducting the field work for my master thesis with RSO group on Understanding changes in land tenure and livelihoods among the pastoral Maasai in southern Kenya.

Over the past decades, pastoral Maasai have been increasingly exposed to various pressures to their pastoral livelihoods such as demographic development, the spread of national and games parks or an increased privatization and commercialization of land. One of the biggest pressures and also the focus of my research are changes in land tenure, or more specifically, transformation processes from formerly communally owned land towards increasingly individualized and privatized land (ownerships) – a development thatroughly began during the 1970s and 1980s and continues since then. I am interested in investigating how this transformation in land tenure is shaping and impacting Maasai pastoral livelihoods and Maasai households on a local level, with a specific focus on implications and impacts on local food (in)security. I will explore the current situation at the local level, as well as retrospectively the past decision-making processes of households, in order to understand when, how and why a household decided for instance (not) to change, diversify or maintain a certain livelihood strategy.      Continue reading →