8th Nordic Geographers Meeting, June 16-19, 2019, Trondheim, Norway
Interrogating rural transformations 'from above'
Since the 2007/8 financial crises, activists, academics, governments and international institutions have been discussing whether and how a new wave of land-grabbing has been taking place (White et al. 2012). Responding to what has been called the 'convergence of crises' (finance, food, climate and energy) capital accumulation strategies have increasingly focused on gaining control of the use and benefits of coveted natural resources (McMichael 2012). In the process, a diverse array of actors has in different ways become implicated spanning "businesses and NGOs, conservationists and mining industries, or ecotourism companies and the military" (Fairhead et al. 2012: 239). Furthermore, host-states that facilitate the grabs are at the core of these processes too (Wolford et al. 2013). In the context of increasing intersections and overlaps between different forms of resource grabs (land, water, green, ocean etc.) across time and space, it has furthermore been argued that there is a need for an approach that moves beyond the focus on a single resource or a single case (Hunsberger et al. 2017). Geographies attentive to the spatiality of capitalism, that is how space is constitutive of and constituted by capitalism, without succumbing to an 'impact model' of socio-spatial analysis, involving the surrender to the "inexorable logic of capital" (Hart 2004, 97) are well placed to interrogate these dynamics. Especially well placed, that is, when engaging in explicit dialogue with the rich and rigorous tradition of 'critical agrarian studies' (Edelman & Wolford 2017). At such a conjunction, the very notion of taking rural transformations brought about by resource grabs as emanating 'from above' should be scrutinized empirically and conceptually. Rural people may themselves be active agents in resource grabbing (Hall 2011; Li 2012), demanding geographers interested in the transformational capacities of capitalism to look much further to 'a suite of logics, not only capital-logic' (Mann 2013, 47). This panel aims to further such dialogue by bringing together contributions focusing on such issues as:
* Primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession
* Land, water, green/blue, ocean grabbing
* Challenges of building coherent, broad-based movements around alternative visions - not least in light of the rise of authoritarian populism (Scoones et al. 2018)
Convenors: Mads Barbesgaard (Lund University), Jostein Jakobsen (SUM, University of Oslo), Kenneth Bo Nielsen (SUM, University of Oslo) & Mariel Střen (SUM, University of Oslo)
Please send abstracts (max. 200 words) to: Mads Barbesgaard ([log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> ) and Jostein Jakobsen ([log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> ) - no later than 15th December.
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Jostein Jakobsen
Research Fellow & Research School Coordinator, Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM), University of Oslo
SUM Profile: http://www.sum.uio.no/personer/vit/josteinj/index.html
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jostein_Jakobsen
Latest publications:
Jakobsen, J. (2018). Neoliberalising the food regime 'amongst its others': the right to food and the state in India. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03066150.2018.1449745 Journal of Peasant Studies.
Jakobsen, J. (2018). Towards a Gramscian food regime analysis of India's agrarian crisis: Counter-movements, petrofarming and Cheap Nature. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718518300216 Geoforum 90: 1-10.
Jakobsen, J. and K. B. Nielsen, A. G. Nilsen and A. Vaidya. (2018). Mapping the World's Largest Democracy (1947-2017). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08039410.2018.1465461 Forum For Development Studies.
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