Social Science Research Council

2009 DPDF Research Field:
Critical Agrarian Studies

Although globalization is often rhetorically associated with high-rise call centers, diasporic cultures, industrialization and transnational financial markets, ongoing struggles over the production and consumption of food, fuel and fiber have shaped twenty-first century modernity. Critical Agrarian Studies (CAS) takes these struggles– and their historical antecedents– as its central concern. Across different historical periods, world regions and disciplines, scholars working within the field of Critical Agrarian Studies (CAS) are broadly united by three primary analytical assumptions. First, lived experiences, structural configurations and representations of agrarian societies influence contention over and processes of modernization, development policy, democratization, globalization, and urbanization. Agrarian societies are not primitive, backward, or “other” to modern, urban societies; rather, both are mutually constituted, each necessitating and shaping the other in manifold ways.  Second, work on agrarian societies and themes highlights the importance of the political and cultural economy of production, consumption, accumulation, distribution and governance and requires in-depth understandings of diverse kinds of relations between countryside and city, social classes, regions, economic sectors, and often ethnic and religious groups. Third, understanding the particular dynamics of rural society in any given place and time requires analysis of the experiences and political culture of agrarian classes and communities. Key contemporary themes for which we believe a historically-situated CAS perspective is necessary and productive include: the contemporary transformation of property norms and rights through de-collectivization, land redistribution programs, and wide-scale titling initiatives; the rise of new grassroots social movements and actors who have mobilized to demand radical changes in their relationship to property, production, markets and resources; growing global concern for the quality of agrarian environments threatened by deforestation, groundwater pollution, declining biodiversity, desertification, and global climate changes; and, finally, the financing, production, consumption and distribution of food, fuel and fiber organized in global commodity chains.

Specific topics for study during the DPDF workshop may include (but are not limited to): the politics of the WTO agreements on agriculture and intellectual property; theories of famine and contemporary and historical global food crises; experiences of various green revolutions; agrarian-urban linkages and the “new rurality” (such as the “new” pluriactivity of farm families and the multi-functionality of rural communities); regional and international migration; biofuels; development policies geared towards agriculture and rural areas; rural social movements and transnational peasant movements and networks; and land tenure patterns and competing visions of agrarian reform.

Critical Agrarian Studies embraces a wide range of methodological approaches. The best research practices in tend to emerge from particular questions, but specific methodological tools include ethnography, household surveys, analysis of archival and other documentary materials, oral history, and tabular and graphical analysis of time series and cross-sectional data sets.  Students selected for this field will come from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, economics, geography, history, political science, and sociology. Interdisciplinarity has been a key feature of CAS since its inception and we expect to bring together a variety of students interested in exploring the contributions of multiple and diverse approaches.