1,721,044 research outputs found
Discord, Dispossession And Dairy: Water Governance And Social Change In Canterbury, New Zealand
No full textCreating Peaceful Coexistence in a Context of Chronic Violence: Masculinities, Intimate Violence, and Everyday Reconciliations in Post-Conflict Burundi
No full text234 pagesThis dissertation presents an ethnographic, feminist exploration about tackling “everyday” domestic violence, within the extraordinary conditions of mass violence and dehumanizing poverty. It follows the story of the Abatangamuco, a unique development intervention that emerged after Burundi’s civil war, in a brief moment of peace in a history of chronic violence. Drawing on the experiences of grassroots peacebuilding, the Abatangamuco applied a peace and reconciliation approach to the crisis of domestic violence, which was notably unaddressed in the national peace plan. Applying transitional justice concepts of accountability, truth-telling, reconciliation and forgiveness, the Abatangamuco model catalyzed profound personal transformations among men who once practiced extreme domestic violence. Those men who join the Abatangamuco movement publicly commit to model a new masculinity, based on nonviolence and relationships of mutual respect. While its feminist implications are ambiguous, this little-known story from the poorest country in the world has important insights for scholars and non-academic practitioners. It addresses questions of transitional justice, feminist peacebuilding, masculinities, and development intervention in post-conflict settings. What is intellectually interesting about the Abatangamuco is that it did not fail. Even as Burundi has backslid into a repressive, militarized state, the Abatangumco continues to evolve organically, responding meaningfully to the crisis of thwarted masculinity and gender-based violence. As such, it is an unexpected success of transitional justice, in a context of failed peace. It represents a grounded experiment in feminist peacebuilding, showcasing the possibility for centering, rather than deferring the crisis of domestic violence in transitional justice. It also represents a rare experiment in rehabilitating male perpetrators of domestic violence that creates meaningful pathways for men to restore social relations and self-respect, while constructing a new model of nonviolent masculinity. At the same time, it is not a model of feminist transformation, and its evolution as a model raises critical questions about the necessary dynamics for transformation change and social justice for survivors of domestic violence in a context of extreme poverty and chronic violence. Above all, this is a story about studying intermedial moments and the importance of a feminist perspective and everyday lens into the post-conflict dynamics of reconciliation. This story suggests that even in chronic instability and deprivation, there are times and places when this type of hopeful social intervention can take root. In a region ever on the brink of violence, it is as important to examine the legacy of these of intermedial moments of reconciliation from the margins, as it is to analyze the failures of peace at the top
In the Law & On the Land: Finding the Female Farmer in Myanmar's National Land Use Policy
Get PDFThis paper draws upon twelve months of activist research to examine Myanmar’s female farmer on the land and in the law. For rural women, the female farmer was an anomaly with emancipatory implications, one associated with a particular material conditions, social relations, and attitudes. In contrast, the female farmer in the National Land Use Policy text was a rights-bearing legal subject produced by a set of negotiations in which individuals acting as experts ‘rendered technical’ (Li 2007) distinct ontologies of land, law, and gender. Examining the production of and relationship between these representations helps problematize Myanmar’s contemporary political transition by providing an ethnographic entry point to chart shifting discourses and subjectivities
Automation in a biologically and naturally mediated industry: The envisioned implications of automated strawberry harvesters for the labor process
No full text58 pagesCritical agri-food scholars have argued that previous mechanization efforts in specialty crop industries have led to labor intensification, deskilling, and displacement, while developers of automated strawberry harvesters assert that these machines can relieve farmworkers from physically demanding labor by enabling the reskilling of workers and by improving their working conditions. In order to investigate this tension, this paper draws from labor process theory and critical agri-food studies to better understand how automated harvesters’ envisioned futures will affect workers’ skills and employment if these futures were to materialize. Using critical (multimodal) discourse analysis, I examine interviews with technology developers, agricultural scientists, and experts in strawberry production, and online promotional material published by manufacturers of automated strawberry harvesters. I find that automated strawberry harvesters are envisioned to reduce labor needs and automated harvesting aids have uneven implications for the labor process. This paper also finds that the natural and biological factors of strawberry production complicate the effective automation of harvesting, and therefore, has uneven implications for the labor process. Therefore, I argue that labor process theory, when applied to the study of labor automation in agriculture, needs to account for the natural and biological factors that characterize agriculture
Re-examining pathways to smallholder food security and the transformative potential of agroecology: A case study from Malawi
No full text139 pagesBased on interviews with small farmers in Malawi, I find that the current framing of food security in scientific literature reproduces discursive assumptions, presupposing farmers’ problems and aspirations in a way that privileges production outputs for income generation as the solution to hunger. These assumptions limited the analytic power of theorized pathways to explain the mechanisms behind the way that farmers interviewed were moving towards food security. I argue instead that altering social and ecological relations of production, by which I mean control over land, labor, and farming inputs, are at least as important for smallholders’ access to stable, adequate food as improvements in production outputs. Agroecology does much more to transform these relations than other agricultural paradigms, yet because of the analytical limitations of food security as a discourse, these “social and ecological pathways” to food security are overlooked. This exclusion matters because when core pathways remain invisible, the potential of paradigms like sustainable intensification to jeopardize food security by actively undermining these pathways goes unrecognized. I propose that food sovereignty provides a better narrative for understanding what matters for Malawian smallholders’ food security, and the factors at play behind agricultural transitions to food security in many smallholders’ contexts
READING THE VIOLENT LANDSCAPE: AGROBIODIVERSITY AND MAKING A LIFE IN THE DR CONGO-UGANDA BORDERLANDS
No full text308 pagesThis dissertation investigates how and why people maintain perennial crops amidst protracted agrarian violence, increasingly variable weather patterns driven by global climate change, and the complex histories underpinning each of these dynamics that condition peoples’ experiences and responses. I ground this study on the western slopes of the Rwenzori Mountains that transect the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and western Uganda. This borderland region allows for insights into the culturally and historically embedded political work of the everyday, the 'making of a life' amidst precarity, and the ecological transformations that result from these emplaced relationships. Using ethnographic, participatory, and ecological methods, this research demonstrates how, in the longue durée, people’s lives on the land – their everyday decision-making in pursuit of building a good life – contributes to the unfolding of social, political, and environmental transformations toward perennial cropping systems. Reading the landscape, and the everyday responses to deep and ongoing histories of agrarian violence and uncertainty casts light on how the locus of power is shifted from being not only in the hands of the authorities to whom it seems impossible to appeal or sway, but also in the agency of the collective. First, I contribute to debates on borderlands and conflict studies by charting an environmental history of the eastern DRC-western Uganda borderland region to show that its contemporary contexts of precarity and insecurity are rooted in long-term socioenvironmental and political transformations. Second, I bring scholarship on the political ecology of memory into conversation with crop ecology to show how people’s political responses in cropping systems are shaped by memory, materiality, and sociocultural context. Third, I interrogate how and why people on the Rwenzori front maintain different diversification approaches in their agroforestry systems. I draw upon agrobiodiversity, ethnoecology, agroecology, and participatory ecological methods to develop community and farm-scale typologies that highlight implications of diversification for resilience to violent conflict, food insecurity, and ecosystem service multifunctionality. Fourth, I contribute to critical climate scholarship and conflict studies by attending to people’s ways of enacting a good life amidst compounding agrarian terrorism and increasingly damaging weather extremes. Finally, in my conclusion, I offer some recommendations for application of these results and future research.Cette thèse étudie comment et pourquoi les populations maintiennent des cultures pérennes au milieu d’une violence rurale prolongée, de conditions météorologiques de plus en plus variables et des expériences et réponses des populations à ces dynamiques historiques complexes. L’étude est fondée sur les pentes occidentales des monts Rwenzori qui traversent l’est de la République Démocratique du Congo et l’ouest de l’Ouganda. Cette région frontalière permet de mieux comprendre le travail politique ancré culturellement et historiquement dans le quotidien, la « recherche de la vie » (kutafuta maisha) au milieu de la précarité et les transformations écologiques. En utilisant des méthodes ethnographiques, participatives et écologiques, cette recherche démontre comment, dans la longue durée, la vie des populations sur la terre – leurs prises de décision quotidiennes en quête d’une bonne vie – contribuent au déploiement de transformations sociales, politiques et environnementales vers des systèmes de culture pérenne. La lecture du paysage et des réponses quotidiennes aux histoires profondes et continues de violence et d’incertitude agraires met en lumière la manière dont le lieu du pouvoir est déplacé non seulement entre les mains des autorités, auxquelles il semble impossible de faire appel ou d’influencer, mais aussi dans l’action du collectif. Tout d’abord, la thèse contribue aux débats sur les études de conflits en zones frontalières en retraçant l’histoire environnementale de la région frontalière de l’est de la RDC et de l’ouest de l’Ouganda pour montrer que ses contextes contemporains de précarité et d’insécurité sont enracinés dans des transformations socio-environnementales et politiques à long terme. Deuxièmement, l’argument associe les études sur l’écologie politique de la mémoire agraire à l’écologie des cultures agricoles pour montrer comment les réponses politiques des populations aux systèmes de culture sont façonnées par la mémoire, la matérialité et le contexte socioculturel. Troisièmement, j’interroge comment et pourquoi les populations du front de Rwenzori maintiennent différentes approches de diversification dans leurs systèmes agroforestiers. Je m’appuie sur l’agrobiodiversité, l’ethnoécologie, l’agroécologie et les méthodes écologiques participatives pour développer des typologies à l’échelle de la communauté et de l’exploitation agricole pour mettre en évidence les implications de la diversification pour la résilience aux conflits violents, l’insécurité alimentaire et la multifonctionnalité des services écosystémiques. Quatrièmement, je contribue à la recherche critique sur le climat et aux études sur les conflits en m’intéressant aux façons dont les gens cherchent à maintenir une vie durable dans un contexte de terrorisme agraire et crises climatiques croissantes. Enfin, dans ma conclusion, je propose quelques recommandations pour l’application de ces résultats et les recherches futures
Reclaiming labor for agroecological futures in Malawi
No full text194 pagesShifting the technical conditions of farming has been a focus of development for centuries, and directly influences the labor process on-farm, dictating how farmers work, the underlying reason for that work, and their social and ecological relations (Kloppenburg 2014; Little and Watts 1999; Long et al. 1986). With the rise of the industrial agricultural model and its accompanying geopolitical relations, Malawi has focused public and private resources on ‘modernizing’ its agricultural sector. In this dissertation, I examine how agricultural practice has structured rural livelihoods in Malawi and their outcomes by contrasting how grassroots agroecological interventions influenced smallholder farmers’ participation in informal agricultural wage employment, called ganyu. Agroecology derives principles and practices from ecological science and indigenous, local smallholder farmers’ knowledge to mimic functional biodiversity’s role in natural ecosystems and other ecosystem functions (e.g. soil, water, and nutrient cycling. This project also addresses gaps in agroecological research by exploring how the approach’s labor-intensive practices affect labor productivity, working conditions, and class dynamics of smallholder agriculture. I engage with a variety of theoretical perspectives, from critical agrarian studies, political ecology, and development economics, with the aim to contribute to a range of conversations about the future of farming in Sub-Saharan Africa. I find that the dominant approach to improving agricultural productivity, industrial intensification, increased ganyu dependency and chronic food insecurity among poor smallholder farmers. Agroecology’s production relations interrupted this process of depeasantization by healing the metabolic rift in agricultural practice. The rift in nutrient cycling, which farmers experienced as consistently low yields whenever fertilizer was not applied, stemmed from both their technical approach to farming (monoculture, synthetic fertilizer or no/low input of manure), and the removal of their labor from the land. I argue that, in contexts of depeasantization, agroecology’s potential to heal the metabolic rift is thus rooted as much in its direct practice- as a form of sustainable agriculture- as in its specific production relations that support repeasantization. Repeasantization also changed the daily experience of work, to produce an affect that encouraged environmental care, as human labor combined productively with that of nature’s. In addition, agroecology also interrupted the deproletarianization, expressed as low wages and low negotiation power, that depeasantization reinforced. Classes remained differentiated according to labor relations, but as agroecology reduced reliance on several commodity relations that had reinforced these labor relations, fewer households belonged to the ganyu workforce, and the market power of those households that remained ganyu workers increased. This research thus concludes that agroecology has the potential to shift labor dynamics in a way that is transformative for farming livelihoods and the agroecosystems that sustain them.2026-06-1
The Intersection Of Race And Food In The Rust Belt: How Food Justice Challenges The Urban Planning Paradigm
Get PDFWhile many voices in the various contemporary food movements recognize the unsustainable and unhealthy character of the modern corporate food system, there is little work, to date, that addresses the embedded structural and institutional injustices in the food system that reinforce already-existing racialized inequities. The intersection of food and race in the urban rust belt is marked by historical and institutionalized inequality, where geographies of race, poverty, and hunger - situated in a post-industrial context - are mediated by both capitalist restructuring and the inattention of urban planners. As a reaction to the economic downturn and spatial reconfiguring that coincided with industrial production, neoliberal restructuring in the postindustrial rust belt has focused particularly on attracting capital and fostering economic growth within cities. The neoliberal restructuring of capital in the rust belt has entailed a spatial reconstruction whereby neighborhoods and bodies are intentionally managed, producing a specific kind of city where poorer neighborhoods and populations are barred from public view. Through these processes, the public gaze is directed onto "entrepreneurialized" downtowns and historic districts representing the successes of neoliberal policies in attracting capital and investment (Brenner & Theodore 2002; Wilson 2007). Provisioning of food has been rendered more invisible in the urban context where planners tend to concentrate first and foremost on the physical and land use aspects of planning. Urban relations of power are reproduced by and help to produce urban social formations, emphasizing the fundamental importance of racialized and classed spaces and the role of both affluence and whiteness in shaping not only urban geographies, but decision-making processes surrounding hunger and food. Among the many alternative food movements, a food justice approach centers its objectives on restructuring the production, distribution and consumption processes within the food system. Food justice organizing attempts to transform the food system by challenging the inequities and structural racisms reproduced through it. Food justice, like other alternative food practices, operates within - and must therefore contend with - a hegemonic neoliberal political and economic environment. Organizations are subject to the influences of market-based ideologies and the resulting promotion of individualism, selfsufficiency, and non-reliance on social services. This research explores how food justice organizing creates space for collaborate planning to reproduce resilience and solidarity within communities, rather than perpetuate social and economic instability, food insecurity, and dependence on the charity sector or welfare services. Focusing on the historical legacy of marginalization and neglect faced by urban Black communities, I explore how that marginalization is reflected in and magnified by a socially unjust and structurally racist food system. Examples of food justice activism show the possibility of shifts in the urban planning paradigm toward more intentional and collaborative food system planning processes. Throughout this thesis, I dissect the discourse and politics surrounding city planning and renewal within Syracuse and the rust belt more generally, considering to what extent normative planning processes perpetuate and exacerbate the racialized inequalities already present in the food system. I examine how the infiltration of neoliberal ideologies such as individualism, self-sufficiency, and market-based entrepreneurialism also influence the structures of and interactions between the multiple "alternative" food movements, and the tensions between official and alternative methods of food system organization. Alternative methods of city planning have the potential to reimagine the rust belt, recreating cities in such a way that they do not look back to their industrial past or economic apex with the hopes of recreating it. Rather, by creating the space for inclusive planning processes, marginalized communities can have a voice and sway over the evolution of the food landscape in their neighborhoods, and are empowered to work toward a vision of food justice that conceptualizes food as a right, rather than a privilege
TRANSLATING CASSAVA ATTRIBUTES PREFERRED BY UGANDAN SMALLHOLDER FARMERS INTO BREEDING TARGETS
No full text128 pagesSupplemental file(s) description: supplementary files associated with chapter three, Supplementary files associated with chapter one.Cassava is the second most important staple food crop in Uganda. However, the adoption of improved varieties remains low, partly because some improved varieties do not have the attributes preferred by end-users. To contribute towards addressing this gap, I conducted three studies: 1) Examining cassava attributes preferred by smallholder farmers in four districts within Uganda. Results revealed yield (many roots and big root size),, early maturity, and root quality (taste, long in-ground storability of roots, softness of cooked roots, and non-bitter roots) were predominant attributes preferred by farmers; 2) Determining heritability of softness of cooked cassava roots, one of the key attributes preferred by end-users. Softness was evaluated at four cooking time intervals: 15, 30, 45, and 60 minutes using a penetrometer on 268 cassava genotypes. Estimates of broad-sense heritability ranged from 0.17 to 0.37, with the highest value observed at 45 min of cooking time. I also quantified the relationship between penetrometer and consumer-testing methods for phenotyping softness of cooked cassava roots. The two methods were strongly correlated (r2 = 0.91; P-value = 0.003), suggesting a penetrometer can be used for phenotyping softness; 3) Determining the genetic relationships of cassava varieties grown by farmers in Uganda, and the relationship between farmer-grown varieties and breeding lines. Genotyping-by-sequencing was used to score 287,952 single nucleotide polymorphisms in 547 samples of farmer-named cassava varieties collected by random sampling of 192 smallholder farms within four districts in Uganda, and a panel of 349 breeding lines from the cassava national breeding program in Uganda. The genetic differentiation we observed among farming districts in Uganda (mean FST = 0.003) is similar to divergence observed within other countries. Despite the fact that none of the breeding lines were directly observed in farmer fields, genetic divergence between the populations was low (FST = 0.020). Interestingly, we detected the presence of introgressions from the wild relative M. glaziovii on chromosomes one and four, which implies ancestry with cassava breeding lines. Our study highlights the importance of understanding the genetic make-up of cassava currently grown by smallholder farmers and relative to that of plant breeding germplasm
EXPLORING THE INFLUENCES OF PROGRAM DELIVERY AND HOUSEHOLD GENDER DYNAMICS ON MATERNAL AND CHILD HEALTH IN RURAL TANZANIA
No full text227 pagesIn the public health community, there is often a lack of research on implementation of interventions of known effectiveness. Challenges of implementation and gender and household dynamics that affect intervention uptake, are potential reasons why individuals fail to make behavioral changes that improve maternal and child health and nutrition. This research concerns a small-scale implementation research study within a larger five-year program, "Addressing Stunting in Tanzania Early (ASTUTE)", aimed at reducing childhood malnutrition at scale and preventing stunting in children, as stunting remains a serious public health problem among children under 5 in Tanzania. ASTUTE relied on community health workers (CHWs) to implement a significant portion of community-based programming in 5 regions of Tanzania. This research examined what factors affect CHW delivery of community interpersonal communication programs, and gender dynamics that affect the practice of behaviors promoted by the CHWs during home visits. This was assessed through the following aims: 1) Phase A: To assess who the CHWs are visiting for home visits, and if they are capturing the most vulnerable households, 2) Phase B: To understand how household gender dynamics, particularly decision-making, are associated with recommended of maternal and child nutrition behaviors, particularly behaviors that were promoted during the CHW home visit. In Phase A, we found low coverage of and many practical and legitimate barriers to providing home visits to the most vulnerable households, even by CHWs who were highly motivated. This research has implications for social and behavioral change (SBC) interventions replying on CHWs or other volunteers for community programs. In Phase B, our in-depth qualitative work allowed us to provide a deeper understanding on how perceptions of decision-making differ between men and women, how disagreement between couples affects decisions around food and nutrition, and lastly the role of intimate partner violence (IPV) in decision-making. Phase B highlighted the importance of gender transformative work, as well as considerations for measurement of household decision-making in behavioral change interventions. This mixed-methods dissertation uniquely identified understudied areas for improvement and scale up of similar community-based maternal and child nutrition interventions
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