Format/Structure

Open panel. 10-15 minutes presentations plus ample time for discussion among panelists and with the audience.

Long Abstract

The agrarian question, in its plural articulations and reinterpretations, has been central to both critical agrarian studies and political ecology; yet, its contemporary understandings, analytics, and geographies tend to treat it as an almost Global South-exclusive problematique. As Global North scholars, activists and farmers, working on land, peasantries, agrarian economies and rural futures, we aim to contribute to the conversation that seeks to ‘reopen’ the agrarian question in the North, with a focus on European countrysides, but in radical alliance with majority world Indigenous, peasant and land struggles.

The intent is twofold: on the one hand, bringing back into the conversation European ruralities and agrarian economies, their crises, their politics and their potential for socio-ecological transformation; on the other, rethinking agricultural (re)production, dependencies, (agro)ecologies, and labour in the North in radical alliance with delinking, liberation, self-determination and anti-imperialist struggles in the South.

We are interested in proposals that explore the agrarian question in Europe, starting from (yet not limited to) themes such as:

- Northern agrarian metabolisms and their colonial patterns: migrant labour, core-periphery relations (also with internal peripheries); dependencies in the agri-food system; global value, labour and care chains;

- Reclaiming rural Europe from the Right: reactionary politics versus ecosocialist potentials;

- Why are people “still” farming? Desire, affect, and the “peasant principle”;

- (Migrant) worker solidarity in the agri-food system;

- Property and its transformations;

- The “agrarian question of climate change” (as termed by Paprocki & McCarthy); green transitions and their impacts on agrarian communities;

- Political agroecology, socio-ecological reproduction and food sovereignty for the North, beyond localisms.

This Panel has 10 pending paper proposals.
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