Debates on the Social Life of Land: Launching the Land Series at Cornell University Press

Type: Virtual Panel
Theme:
Sponsor Groups: Geographies of Food and Agriculture Specialty Group, Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group
Organizers: Andrew Ofstehage
Chairs: Andrew Ofstehage

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Description

Struggles over access to, control, and use of land have shaped states, societies, and communities. Such struggles derive more from the abundance of values, meanings, and claims on the land than from its purported scarcity. Land constitutes promise, power, and profit. It’s a critical component of settlement, livelihoods, and identities. The search for “new” land—land that is characterized as virgin, empty, or idle—has motivated political and economic expansion and generated recurrent concerns about the availability and distribution of resources. Small holders, city dwellers, pastoralists, state bureaucrats, investors, social movement actors, and scientists all value land in different ways, many of which are incommensurable. Valuation—through affect and desire as well as economy—produces inequalities and shapes our histories of and on the land. Panelists, all authors or contributors to books in the Land Series at Cornell University Press, draw from their own work to highlight land as a site of struggle, work, and life. Panelists think through land financialization by dispossession in India; gendered relations between manioc and land in Mozambique; mobile labor and land in Java; the intersection of agrarian and climate change in Bangladesh; the global financialization of land; and the importance of soil care in Brazil. We bring together disparate research locations and analytic entry points to identify and explore the multiple faces of land. We ask, how do people live with and through land?

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Agenda

Type	Details	Minutes
Panelist	Michael Goldman University of Minnesota-Twin Cities	10
Panelist	Madeleine Fairbairn University of California - Santa Cruz	15
Panelist	Andrew Ofstehage Cornell University	15
Panelist	Kasia Paprocki London School of Economics	15
Panelist	Nancy Peluso University of California, Berkeley	10
Panelist	Wendy Wolford Cornell University	10