Reimagining land: materiality, affect and the uneven trajectories of land transformation

Abstract

Agriculture and Human Values is the journal of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society. The Journal, like the Society, is dedicated to an open and free discussion of the values that shape and the structures that underlie current and alternative visions of food and agricultural systems.

The Journal publishes research that critically examines the values, relationships, conflicts and contradictions within contemporary agricultural and food systems and that addresses the impact of agricultural and food related institutions, policies, and practices on human populations, the environment, democratic governance, and social equity.

Biographical Note

Sarah Ruth Sippel (SFB 1199 & Leipzig University, Germany)

Sarah Ruth Sippel is a lecturer at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and a Principal Investigator at the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 1199. Her research interests concern the complex nature of the global agri-food system, particularly questions in relation to food security, the financialization of agriculture and food, and the alternatives that are being developed to the current agri-food system. All these issues raise important questions in relation to politics, ethics, and social justice, which motivate her research. As a human geographer with a background in Middle Eastern Studies and Philosophy, Sarah investigates social phenomena from an interdisciplinary and transregional perspective. She intensively worked on the interlinkages between export agriculture, rural livelihood security, and labour migration in North Africa and the Western Mediterranean. Her current research addresses the diverse (re)imaginations of land in Australia.

Oane Visser (International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands)

Oane Visser is associate professor at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), in The Hague, part of Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He has been visiting researcher at University of Oxford, Toronto University, Cornell University and City University New York. Building on his long-term research on agrifood issues, his latest research projects study digitalization in the sphere of agriculture, natural resources and global development more broadly. He is principal investigator of a Toyota Foundation funded international project on digital/smart farming, emerging farm data cooperatives and changing values regarding data in the EU, Russia and Australia. Another (ISS-funded) project examines the labour implications of new digital technologies in EU agriculture. Further, together with data scientists, he investigates the role of big data and AI in preventing or mitigating land grabs. Visser also furthers his longer standing research on (super)large farms, farmland investment and financialisation (investigated amongst others within his European Research Council (ERC) project), increasingly seeking to integrate it with environmental history and the study of the impact of climate change. Another important line of research is around smallholders, alternative food networks and (‘quiet’) food sovereignty, in particular in post-socialist countries.