This Capita Selecta course is organized by Stichting ReGeneratie in collaboration the Rural Sociology chair group. The course is not funded by the university and contains many excursions. We therefore need to ask a course fee of €100 person for traveling, meals and tours. You will be visiting the oldest food forests and meet the key players in food forestry in the Netherlands. You can register yourself by completing this form.
Zeynep Oguz*
Turkish and Kurdish studies have been moving in important directions in the past decade. Studies of the importance of space and placemaking in Kurdish issue (Gambetti and Jongerden 2015) have been complemented by sustained engagements with material culture, nature, and environments in Kurdistan, as well as how they are central to colonial practices, state violence, and resistance. Today, from the study of ruins and ruination in burial sites and ghosts and, therefore, the interaction between the material and the symbolic, one can learn from anthropological and historical studies of how forests and forest fires, water and rivers, mountains, and animals have been entangled with power and resistance in Kurdistan (See Adalet 2022, Bozcali 2020, Biner 2019, Çaylı 2021, Oguz 2021, Suni 2023).
Continue readingSeda Altuğ*
The scholarly debates in Ottoman /Kurdish studies regarding the Armenian and Kurdish issues from late 19th century onwards, reveals that the national question is usually viewed as a product of competing nationalisms— that is, political ideologies built around conceptions of communal belonging and statehood. The scholarship on sectarianism in the Arab Middle East, too, despite critical work in the last decade, has been dominated by rather ahistorical and primordial assumptions concerning the relationship between religion, modernity and politics in the Ottoman imperial and (post-Ottoman) colonial contexts.
Continue readingMarcin Skupiński* & Dobrosława Wiktor-Mach**
The conflicts over the land and the environment spark all across Turkey as many local communities oppose large scale development projects, often supported by the state. Yet in the Kurdish inhabited areas of Turkey, the end of the Turkish-Kurdish peace process heavily limited possibilities of action for activists seeking to implement their ideas of ecology and autonomy. However, even in such a hostile environment many of our interlocutors adhere to the strategy of “building a new world in the shell of the old” and are seeking to build up more sustainable structures.
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August 30, 2023, 13.30-15.00 Claudia Oviedo Rodriguez will defend her PhD-thesis titled The Promised Transformation: Mexican Coffee Policies During the Administration of President López Obrador during a ceremony in the Auditorium of the Omnia building of Wageningen University. The ceremony will be live broadcasted: a link will appear five minutes before the start in the events box (upper left of the screen). See the Abstract below. The full thesis can be downloaded once the embargo has been lifted: clicking its DOI. The paper Incorporation of different types of farmers into different coffee markets is published open access in the Canadian Journal of Development Studies. Contact: claudia.oviedo.rodriguez@outlook.com.
Abstract
This thesis analyses Mexican coffee policies during the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). It builds on approaches of state theories, agrarian political economy, and global value chain studies, and contributes to debates regarding the role of the state in small farmers’ livelihoods. The thesis is based on a case study analysing implementation of rural policies in the Soconusco region of Chiapas, and contains four empirical and analytical chapters. Chapter 1, “Evolution of Coffee Policies in Mexico”, addresses how the interests of the state and its mechanism of support to coffee farmers evolved from the time this crop was introduced to Mexico until the start of the AMLO administration. Chapter 2, “Incorporation of Different Types of Farmers into Different Coffee Markets”, discusses social differences among beneficiaries of rural programmes and the conditions under which different types farmers are incorporated into the market. Chapter 3, “Arabica, Robusta, and the Narrative of Quality Coffee”, analyses collaboration and conflicts among the state, small-scale farmers, farmer organizations, and the coffee processing industry with respect to formulation and implementation of coffee policies. It also explores the role of quality in the politics of coffee. Chapter 4, “AMLO’s Rural Programmes and Elimination of Intermediaries” discusses achievements and weaknesses of rural programmes, paying particular attention to the AMLO administration’s strategy of bypassing farmer organizations upon providing agricultural subsides. The aim of this thesis is to understand how a radical transformation that has been promised by the Mexican state influences social relationships among the state, small farmers, farmer organizations, and the coffee processing industry.
Rural Sociology Wageningen University 