Hosted by the Rural Sociology Group, Wageningen University and Research, September 1, 2023
In Kurdistan occupations and demonstrations by landless workers and peasants demanding land reform have taken place on a large scale since the middle of the 20th century. In more recent years, this contestation over land has overlapped with the rise of environmental activism. The workshop Contentious Politics in Kurdish Studies: Land, Nature, and Infrastructure addresses a number of theoretical debates and questions related to land.
Affiliations of the participants
Kamuran Akin is an independent researcher who recently defended his PhD at the Institut für Europäische Ethnology, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
Seda Altuğ is a lecturer at the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul.
Aysegul Aslan is a Ph.D. candidate in geography at Fırat University, Turkey, and a visiting fellow at the Environmental Policy Group at Wageningen University, the Netherlands
Eray Çaylı is a professor of Human Geography with a Focus on Violence and Security in the Anthropocene, Hamburg University, Germany
Pinar Dinc is a researcher at the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University.
Ayhan Işık is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Centre de Recherche Mondes Modernes et Contemporains, Université libre de Bruxelles.
Adnan Mirhanoğlu is a researcher in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at KU Leuven, Belgium.
Zeynep Oguz is a lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.
Murat Öztürk is associate professor at the Department of Economics at Kırklareli University in Turkey.
Marcin Skupiński is a Ph.D. candidate at Warsaw University, Poland.
Necmettin Türk is a PhD Candidate in the Working Group “Critical Geographies of Global Inequalities” at the Institute of Geography, Hamburg University, Germany.
Filyra Vlastou-Dimopoulou is a Ph.D. candidate in Human Geography (NTUA & Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.
Dobrosława Wiktor-Mach is professor of Economics, Cracow University, Poland.
Organizers
Joost Jongerden – Associate professor at the Rural Sociology Group, Wageningen University, the Netherlands joost.jongerden@wur.nl
Francis O’Connor – is a Marie Curie Skłodowska Post-Doctoral Fellow in Rural Sociology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Francis.oconnor@wur.nl
Els Hegger is a farmer and researcher working with RSO on the SWIFT project. In this post, she reflects on the role of women in dominant agricultural debates and her own experiences at the SWIFT project kick-off meeting.
Els writes:
Because of the Brazilians (representing the MST movement), I realised what is going on and how -maybe- there is an alternative. When reading this project proposal I was both very interested and at the same time, I thought: “Didn’t we have this whole feminine thing, is this really necessary? Aren’t women in the Netherlands already empowered? Is this discussion about inclusion, LHBTIQ+ etc., really necessary?” I didn’t raise these questions out of resistance but because I didn’t see it. For me, women have the same opportunities as men. At least… I thought so.
However… women are absent in their fullness. We participate under certain set conditions, set by a white male capitalist-dominated history. It is so entrenched that I guess we don’t fully realize this.
Look at the main agricultural stage in the Netherlands. Yes, we now have Caroline v/d Plas, but is that a female representation? As a farmer, as a woman, as an Agroecological entrepreneur, I don’t feel represented. It’s not my arena. The method, the sound, the non-verbal language. We withdraw because we don’t feel at ease, we don’t feel home. Lethargy kicks in.
So, we need to create our home where we feel at home. Which language fits this? Which stories resonate? Is it singing, dancing, mystica, poems, histories…? Only if we re-create and co-create these, we can connect and only then we can enter the political arena. It’s rather obvious, but at the same time it is so interwoven with everything that we stop realising, it settles in the subconscious.
Within Toekomstboeren we’ve had quite some discussions about exactly this (although not specified through women) as I nearly withdrew from Toekomstboeren. I said I didn’t feel comfortable with the way we enter politics. For me, agroecology (AE) is so different from the dominant narrative that I cannot lobby in a traditional way, being drawn to the tables and tell what we need.
It is not my language and then we are tempted to withdraw. That’s why women are invisible. AE is a way of life, not a job you hold. It is running through my veins, it’s in every cell and bone. AE is not about ecologic farming, the word logic is not fitting. It’s beyond any rationale in a traditional sense; it is like the rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari. Mapping these could be an interesting insight.
Then there are the Brazilians (and there are more examples), who have developed their own language in a broad sense. They are able to mobilise an energy that truly connects: it is not only hierarchical, vertical talkative way of getting what you want. It is more horizontally moving, feeling as part of something not being united because you’re against something. This Brazilian way of mobilizing creates a togetherness that gives power to act. On a physical level, I feel backed, not such a naked back.
Obviously, this is a language beyond words. It is an all-encompassing language. A body language as much as a nature-language. It knows no race, ethnic origin, colour, male-female, it just is. You could say it is a feminine energy that complements the very overly present male energy. But.. is that correct? Or do we need to redefine? Is it a scale that is round, the edges are stretched so much that the ends are the beginning again? One of the Brazilians said: “Dare to acknowledge the woman inside you.” That goes for everyone, not only women. Vertical and horizontal.
Could you say that we need to tilt this structure of power?
The extremes are voiced, but the big middle group is searching. Is it a Western thing, a capitalistic view on male/female? Power? I think of Indonesia where I saw much more softness with men and at the same time a pride and dignity with both men and women. Equal in a very different sense. How does this result in voicing?
To come back to the beginning: changing the narrative. Which stories do we want to tell, to share, to connect to and built upon? We need to reframe, reconstruct and reclaim the words farmer, farming and food production. Stop talking about nature, start being it. Stop trying to fit in. Empower ourselves through language (including non-verbal language). Which future do we want to live now?
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Els Hegger runs a small CSA market garden in the east of the Netherlands. Besides running this small-scale farm, she is an active member of Toekomstboeren and has a seat in the Federation of Agroecological Farmers in the Netherlands. One day a week she is a researcher at the Rural Sociology Group for the SWIFT-project. Els is passionate about flipping around dominant stories of food production and consumption, in order to reclaim truths and recognise the rich diversity of which human beings are an inherent entwined part.
As part of our new course ‘Beyond Sustainability: Theorizing post- and anti-capitalist food futures’ (RSO58806), we are curating an evening seminar series where we will welcome scholars and activists engaged in reimagining food and society more generally. You are cordially invited to join us for the seminars!
In March 2023, three Rural Sociology Group researchers (and one RSO intern) attended the kick-off meeting for the EU-funded SWIFT project. RSO leads the part of the project on Gender-Responsive Rural Policies across the EU, with Oxfam Belgium.
Jessica Duncan, Georgia Diamanti, Greta Capaite, Els Hegger from RSO participate in the SWIFT meeting in Agres, Spain
In what follows, SWIFT researcher Georgia Diamanti shares some of her experiences and reflections.
What is the SWIFT project?
SWIFT, which stands for Supporting Women-Led Innovations in Farming and Rural Territories, is a Horizon Europe project set up with the purpose to advance the position of women and LGBTQI+ persons in farming, and to moreover investigate how agroecological processes can promote gender equality. Agriculture is masculine: only 30% of all agriculture in Europe is practiced by women and, when you go higher up, at the relevant policy decision-making boards, women are almost absent. It is against this context that SWIFT is operating.
At the time of the project meeting, I had just been working at Wageningen University and on this project for a little over a month but was quite excited at the prospect of getting to join the rest of the project members in Spain for our kickoff meeting. The organizations and institutions that were part of SWIFT were spread across Europe and as such we mostly only knew each other over Zoom meetings.
We arrived on Sunday evening, following a scenic drive through the Spanish mountainside – just as the sunset’s final colors filtered through the trees. The house we were to spend the coming week, “Riera d’Agres”, was a beautifully restored property that used to function, as we later found out, as a children’s farm camp. Here, children were taught agroecological principles and a consciousness of the work that goes into getting food on a plate. It felt like a very fitting venue for the occasion. Slowly, we gathered in the dining hall.
SWIFT participants rest and connecyt outside Riera d’Agres
As we sat for our first dinner, persons who we had thus far known only as faces on our screens began one by one to materialize. After handshakes and warm hugs were exchanged, people seemed to enter into lively conversations. It was clear how we were all connected by common interests and values. It made coexistence feel comfortable and natural, almost from the very start. Amidst the excitement to have made it and to find ourselves in such a beautiful place after a long journey (that had preceded for the majority of us) there was also a detectable feeling of uncertainty, about what was to come in these 5 days we were set to spend in Agres. Not much later, satiated by the flavourful food that was served to us by our hosts, we retired to our rooms for the night, excited for the week to begin.
To give some context to the week, it was to be split into two parts overall; Monday and Tuesday were for the SWIFT group to get introduced, and to brainstorm about project expectations, concerns, etc., while Wednesday to Friday was to be focused on bringing in the experiences of the WLIs. For this part, women (and one non-binary) farmers were invited to join in our activities, while also being given the space to share their experiences and desires for the project.
The very logic behind SWIFT was for it to grow in a more organic, bottom-up approach – one that incorporated the experiences of those affected by the policies within the process itself. To make the producers from research object to research subject. Here, we were even joined by three women who had come all the way from Brazil who worked with various feminist and agroecological organizations, and Maggie who operated an LGBTQI+ farm in New York. While not directly under the scope of SWIFT (which focuses on the EU) their purpose was to share and inspire – something which they most definitely did.
The latter part of the week was the more emotional one. Seeing the women speak about their experiences and the emotion with which they articulated their troubles, concerns, and hopes resonated visibly with the rest of the group. I recall briefly scanning the room while one of the producers was speaking, only to find tears gleaming in many of the attentive faces as we listened together. It was nice to see that not only had the space we’d created allowed so many of us to be open and vulnerable but also that this process was growing as intended, in collaboration with those whose lives the research concerns.
During the final days, we spoke also of concrete ways in which to help achieve the goals of SWIFT – here I refer not only to our strict deliverables to the EU but also further ways through which the project could truly be of assistance to the Women Led initiatives (WLIs) and their daily struggles. We talked a lot about the possibility (and responsibility) of research as a form of activism. And so, although it’s true that SWIFT had a lot of policy-related deliverables, we also spoke of how we could, in parallel work to change the general narrative; speaking even of facilitating a feminist school or a documentary (ideas that seemed to receive high support from the majority).
If anything, even the academic literature itself continuously points out cultural norms and normative expectations as barriers to women being able to realize their full potential, particularly in the developed world where strict legal barriers to land ownership are not present as they are in developing countries but where barriers nevertheless persist. As such, while collaborating with EU institutions is important, other soft-power strategies may be worth investing in.
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Georgia Diamanti is a Researcher with the SWIFT project. She has been working on this since February 2023. She holds an MSc in Political Science from the University of Amsterdam and will soon start a PhD in the Rural Sociology Group on gender and rural policies, with a focus on social and environmental sustainability.
Francis O’Connor, Postdoc at the Rural Sociology Group and Kamuran Akin, Independent Researcher
The content of insurgent movements’ publications can be telling, yet the issues which they exclude or deny can be of even greater illustrative value. Downplaying violence against civilians or sources of illicit funding can be expected, but what of movements who ignore practises of rebel governance, which are not only popular with their supportive constituencies but also bestow legitimacy with the international public? This paper looks at the puzzling case of the PKK whose publications systematically neglected forms of governance – in particular its alternative justice systems – it implemented at the height of its insurgency in Turkey through the 1980s and 1990s.
Rural Sociology Wageningen University 