Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, NYC - 2012

Session:

Agrarian Change: Critical Geographies of Land, Social Mobilization, and Agrarian Political Economy

Convenor: Alejandro Camargo (Syracuse University)           

The penetration of capitalism into rural areas, as well as the politics of transition, which has moved peasantry from a subsistence-based economy to a global capitalist network of production, have been core topics within social sciences since the advent of classical political economy.  Despite the critical evaluations of these classical explanations, the study of “agrarian change” remains highly relevant to the understanding of current international relations, global food regimes, global development, and environmental sustainability, among other issues.   This is so, in part, because of the central place given to agriculture in the (re) production of capitalism –as in the case of agro-fuels industries and global land grabbing, for instance.  The study of agrarian change is also important, however, because of the social mobilization, resistance, opposition, and alternatives that emerge as responses to the spread of agrarian capitalism and the entrenchment of land concentration. 

Geographers are becoming increasingly interested in this “double movement” as part of the places, spaces, environments, and societies they study.  Therefore, this session aims at bringing together scholars to critically analyze the dynamics of agrarian change from a geographical perspective.  Although topics are open, presenters are encouraged to think, from their own theoretical and/or empirical analysis, about the implications, challenges, and contributions of a “geography of agrarian change.”  Potential topics may include:

• -       Theorizing geographies of agrarian change.
• -       The internationalization of corporate agribusiness.
• -       Emerging land and agrarian reforms.
• -       Agrarian social movements, mobilizations, and peasant governmentalities.
• -       Land tenure/Land struggles.
• -       Property rights, access to land, and institutions.
• -       (Re)structuring of farming.
• -       Gendering agrarian change.
• -       Contradictions and tensions between land tenure and       environmental conservation.
• -       Land grabbing.
• -       Repeasantization and the production of peasantness.
• -       Rural labour and global markets.
• -       Food regimes/food crisis.
• -       Biofuels and agrarian markets.
• -       Political economies of organic farming.
• -       Neoliberalism and agrarian production.
• -       Political ecologies of pesticides and agrochemicals. 
• -       Ecological dimensions of agrarian change. 
• -       Water and agrarian change.

Submit your abstract of no more than 250 words and complying with the AAG guidelines by September 21^st to [log in to unmask]