1,720,960 research outputs found
Local Food Networks and the Pursuit of Autonomy: Examining Agricultural Risk Management in Jalisco, Mexico
No full textThe following thesis explores the impact that market structure may have on how small-scale farmers experience and adapt to risk. Through qualitative research within five local food initiatives in Jalisco, Mexico, I explore the particular risks that producers perceive as being most serious, as well as the strategies used within these markets to mitigate those risks. I argue that many of the adaptive choices that farmers use to stabilize their own livelihoods are enabled by distinct features within direct-to-consumer markets, suggesting that market structure plays a key role in determining the production options available to farmers. In further exploring the politics and material practices used within local food initiatives, I introduce the concept of ‘autonomous food geographies’ to highlight those strategies used to develop institutional contexts within which farmers are able to exert greater control over their own livelihoods.M.A
The Socio-ecological Ramifications of Boom Crops: Examining the Impacts of Oil Palm Expansion upon Food System Vulnerability in the Lachuá Ecoregion, Guatemala
Get PDFIntegration of contract farmers into oil palm production schemes has been advocated as a strategy for spurring rural development and improving food security in the global South. In Guatemala, oil palm contract farming has been promoted through a contentions government program, which has led to rapid expansion of the crop in the country’s northern lowlands, including the Lachuá Ecoregion where this study is set. In this thesis, the socio-ecological food systems framework is used to demonstrate ways in which oil palm expansion has altered food system vulnerability and adaptation capacity in an oil-palm dominated community in the Lachuá Ecoregion, as compared to a neighbouring community with minimal oil palm presence and prevalent staple maize farming. Effects of oil palm on local land transactions, employment, and household income are examined in relation to cross-scalar dynamics of self-provisioning and market-provisioning of food. Ecological variables including the conditions of forests, water, and soil nutrient cycling are also considered as they lead to changes in local food access and consumption patterns, notably the reduced consumption of fresh vegetables, fruits, and herbs. This study challenges the official narrative that smallholder oil palm cultivation catalyses rural development, improves food security, and deters peasant land sales. Results indicate that oil palm expansion has accelerated land sales and put pressure on subsistence farming, while providing limited benefits to the host community – namely non-inclusive and precarious jobs. At the same time, it exacerbated many existing food system vulnerabilities, such as degraded soils and shrinking forest resources, and introduced new ones, including increased exposure to global commodity shocks. The study concludes that, in the absence of profound efforts to address the underlying causes of food system vulnerability, the promotion of cash crops like oil palm will exacerbate inequalities in food access and weaken the food system overall.Ph.D
Local Food Networks and the Pursuit of Autonomy: Examining Agricultural Risk Management in Jalisco, Mexico
Get PDFThe following thesis explores the impact that market structure may have on how small-scale farmers experience and adapt to risk. Through qualitative research within five local food initiatives in Jalisco, Mexico, I explore the particular risks that producers perceive as being most serious, as well as the strategies used within these markets to mitigate those risks. I argue that many of the adaptive choices that farmers use to stabilize their own livelihoods are enabled by distinct features within direct-to-consumer markets, suggesting that market structure plays a key role in determining the production options available to farmers. In further exploring the politics and material practices used within local food initiatives, I introduce the concept of ‘autonomous food geographies’ to highlight those strategies used to develop institutional contexts within which farmers are able to exert greater control over their own livelihoods.M.A
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
“Nosotros no comemos caña”: Defence of Territory and Agrarian Change in the Polochic Valley, Guatemala
Get PDFSince the turn of the 21st century, the establishment and subsequent expansion of three (agro)extractive industries – sugarcane, oil palm, and nickel mining – in the Polochic valley lowlands of northern Guatemala has reduced local indigenous Q’eqchi’ campesino (peasant) communities’ access to farmland. Over the years, campesino groups and their allies have engaged in various forms of political contestation in “defence of territory”. In 2015, Chabil Utzaj, the sugarcane company, ceased operations following a second mass occupation of its plantations. As a result, over 800 campesino households now each have access to around 3.5 ha of farmland. In this dissertation, I employ an extended livelihoods approach consisting of archival research, oral histories, key informant interviews, and household surveys grounded in agrarian political economy to explore how the struggle for defence of territory has contested this latest wave of territorialisation driven by (agro)extractive industries and affected the trajectory of agrarian change in the Polochic valley lowlands. First, I find that while the struggle has produced remarkable achievements of immense intrinsic value to campesinos, household incomes remain, on average, well below national and international poverty lines. Campesino households with access to land by and large provide cheap labour, cheap wage goods, and cheap commodities (including environmental services) that sustain the national plantation-based agro-export industry and related global circuits of accumulation. The campesino struggle thus ultimately co-produced a pattern of uneven development characterised by functional dualism. Second, I argue that campesinos and their allies made effective use of available political opportunities, both toeing the line of “acceptable” politics and strategically transgressing its boundaries when necessary, to contest the reterritorialisation process under way. However, the nature of Guatemala’s elite-dominated political spaces limits the scope of the transformation that can be achieved. While campesinos were able to contest property relations and liberate much-needed spaces of social reproduction, the broader structures that shape labour regimes, income distribution, and social reproduction have remained largely intact. The long-term goal of sustainable agrarian change will remain conditional on a radical transformation of power relations and political spaces within Guatemala – a transformation that would require rethinking the scope of territorial struggles.Ph.D
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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