Announcing for Fall 2021: The ConvivAG LAB

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Research Opportunities for PhD and Masters Students!

ConvivAG LAB is a collaborative research “lab” for scholars and students undertaking critical studies at the intersections of Convivial Conservation and Regenerative Agriculture. Together we will explore roles on ongoing projects and support for independent and thesis projects; we will meet regularly to discuss works in progress; and we will co-build bibliographies and participate in field trips to relevant agroecological projects.

Meetings will take place once or twice per month.

INTRODUCTORY MEETING: Wednesday September 29, 09.30 AM.

FIRST WORKS-IN-PROGRESS : Wednesday, October 12, 2 PM.

FEATURED PROJECTS:

  • Regenerative Agriculture: Practices, Tradeoffs, Origins, Erasures

This project is amassing an archive of cultivation practices considered to be “Regenerative” by various groups and in different places, toward a) assessing the growing diversity of practices, b) highlighting ecological and social tradeoffs among them, and c) tracing practices to indigenous and traditional origins.

  • Genealogies of Sustainability

This project is mapping the terminology of Regenerative Agriculture in conversation with discourses of sustainability in various regions over the past century, toward better understanding social, political, economic ramifications of sharing and discarding language of advocacy. Data collection includes literature review; interviews with farmers, soil scientists, indigenous community leaders, and policymakers; as well as a virtual questionnaire. We are also collecting data from social media, documentary film, podcasts, and interviews, asking how is multispecies conviviality and the act of cultivating greater biodiversity in agriculture depicted in media, by whom, and to what end, with particular attention on the movement of symbols and tropes across advocacy and corporate advertising spheres.

  • Soil Carbon Banking: Markets, Technologies, and Conviviality in Agriculture

Postdoctoral researcher Serena Stein’s focus project, this project accompanies “new/old” possibilities for soil carbon sequestration or “soil carbon banking,” across southern Africa, the United States, and The Netherlands, as they both repeat and diverge from past experiments in carbon trade, commodifying nature, and foreign aid interventions in agrarian landscapes. It involves investigations into changing soil relations; land use and access in racialized settler colonial landscapes; emerging blockchain technology for auditing soil carbon and opportunistic industries; as well as development politics of conservation.

Contact Serena Stein: serena.stein@wur.nl for a link to the first meeting to see about possibilities, ask questions, and find out upcoming meetings.

Our Education Coordinators can also provide information on thesis and internships, thesis rings, and much more: thesis.sdc@wur.nl, thesis.rso@wur.nl

75th Anniversary: 37) Pre-announcement: PhD Course Agrarian and Food Citizenship, May 6–13, 2022

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Introduction

We are delighted to announce our PhD course on agrarian and food citizenship. The course gives participants an opportunity to intensively engage with some of the major debates and approaches on the democratization of our agricultural and food systems so that they can continue to explore and expand these in their own research. The course is organized as a one-week intensive discussion seminar in the week of our 75th anniversary celebration

Agrarian and Food Citizenship

Rooted in a shared belief that our agricultural and food system has produced unsustainable social and environmental cleavages, social movements like Via Campesina have called for the right of people to define their agricultural and food practices. At the same time, various initiatives have emerged that bring this principle into practice. Instead of assuming our relationship to agriculture and food to be that of a consumer making individual decisions in the marketplace, these movements and initiatives have focused on how we organize our agriculture and food practices, and how this can be done different. The aim of this course is to investigate the shift away from a consumerist perspective in which we shop our way to a better agricultural and food system (”vote with our fork”) and towards a citizenship perspective based on the right to have a say in, as well as actively shape, our agriculture and food system. Applying a citizenship lens to an understanding of how our agriculture and food system are organized implies a consideration of the power-relations and identities concealed. In addition, is raises the question how to understand “citizenship”? Various scholars (Isin and Nielsen 2008, Wittman 2009, Carolan 2017) have argued that citizenship is not a formal status, and that people establish themselves as citizens by enacting rights. In this course we will consider agrarian an food citizenship from this perspective of “citizenship acts”.

Target Group and Min/Max Number of Participants

This course is intended for students doing a research master, PhDs, postdocs, and staff members who want to expand their engagement with the democratization of our agricultural and food practices and the citizenship approach to this. In order to ensure opportunities for full discussions during the sessions, the minimum number of participants is 10 and the maximum 20.

More information about the instructors in this course and registration will follow soon.

References

Carolan, M. (2017). No One Eats Alone: Food as a social enterprise. Washington, Island Press.

Isin, E. and G. Nielsen (2008). Acts of Citizenship. London, Zed Books.

Wittman, H. (2009). “Reframing agrarian citizenship: Land, life and power in Brazil.” Journal of Rural Studies(25): 120-130.

Webinar 4: Mundane normativity and the everyday handling of contested food consumption by prof. Bente Halkier

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Mundane normativity and the everyday handling of contested food consumption by prof. Bente Halkier, University of Copenhagen, August 30, 16.00-17.30 (CET):

“Food in everyday life is contested from multiple kinds of public debates in present societies such as climate, health, risk, environment and quality, which point to food consumption in everyday life as a site of normative action In the various strands of sociological research on consumption, contested consumption has typically been studied in two strands One strand tends to focus on the mundane routines in consumption that are reproduced, thus to some degree avoiding the normative dimension in the consumption activities themselves Another strand tends to focus directly on political and ethical consumption, thus to some degree ignoring the more mundane dealings with the normative dimension. My contention is that there is some middle ground to cover between each of the two otherwise valuable strands of consumption research if consumption research is to understand the normative dimension of consumption more fully In order to conceptualize such middle ground, an unfolding of the category of mundane normativity and its conditions is useful, and food consumption in everyday life is a clear example with which to think.“

The talk is part of the Rural Sociology 75th Anniverary webinar series ‘Looking back, Looking Forward: Setting a future agenda for rural sociology’.

The event will be streamed by Zoom. You can now register for the webinar: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_VpRUm51-QberdN-QyKWe0w

Thesis / stage vacature: Regionale initiatieven voor de transitie naar een duurzaam voedselsysteem

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Achtergrond

Ons voedselsysteem is verre van duurzaam. De huidige voedselconsumptie en -productiepatronen dragen sterk bij aan een aantal urgente duurzaamheidsopgaven op het gebied van de gezondheid en welzijn van mens, dier en planeet. Deze duurzaamheidsopgaven zijn geen losstaande problemen; het zijn gerelateerde symptomen van een niet-duurzaam voedselsysteem. In de Nederlandse agrofood sector en daarbuiten zijn vele innovatieve ondernemers, burgers, coalities en andere partijen al actief bezig met de verduurzaming van het voedselsysteem, bijvoorbeeld in het realiseren van korte ketens, het verbinden van stad en platteland, de eiwittransitie, regeneratieve, natuur-inclusieve landbouw en true cost accounting. Daarin is er een groeiende beweging naar gebiedsgericht werken met regionaal georganiseerde netwerken die aansluiten op landschappelijke kenmerken, biodiversiteit, de culturele eigenheid en sociale verbanden van een regio. In een landelijk project gefinancierd door de NWO gaan we in kaart brengen wat voor soort initiatieven in verschillende regio’s zijn ontwikkeld die kunnen bijdragen aan de gewenste transitie en hoe ze aan hun ambities werken.

De thesis/stage opdracht

Je kunt binnen dit landelijke project bijdragen aan de analyse van de verschillen en overeenkomsten tussen initiatieven in doelen, aanpak, betrokken partners en belemmeringen en kansen. Er is een vragenlijst opgesteld waarmee de kenmerken van een groot aantal regionale initiatieven in kaart worden gebracht. Als vervolgstap kun je regionale initiatieven benaderen en met hen verder in beeld brengen wat  hun doelen en ambities zijn, welke kansen en belemmeringen zij ervaren, wat hun strategie is om bij te dragen aan veranderingen en wat hun impact zij willen bereiken op sociaal, ecologisch en economisch gebied.

Je kunt je ook richten op één of enkele regionale initiatieven en met  hen in een vorm van co-creatie verkennen hoe succesvol hun aanpak is, wat het initiatief tot dusver heeft bereikt op sociaal, ecologisch en economisch gebied,  hoe de impact van het initiatief versterkt kan worden en hoe belemmeringen kunnen worden opgelost.

Periode: voorjaar, zomer of najaar 2021

Meer informatie: Henk Oostindie (RSO): henk.oostindie@wur.nl; Jan Hassink: jan.hassink@wur.nl;

75th Anniversary: 36) Hofstee’s puzzle: an innovation for socio-geographic research

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In the 1950s Professor E.W. Hofstee from the former department Sociology and Sociography developed a tool to create maps with statistical data of the Netherlands. You could consider this technique as a predecessor to today’s GIS. In this video Anton Schuurman, Associate Professor of Rural and Environmental History at WUR, explains how the puzzle was used and why it was so unique.