This website offers space to fellow researchers, who discuss emerging perspectives on the making and unmaking of (agrarian) institutional landscapes worldwide. If you are interested in contributing, please contact me directly!
In this space, a particular focus will be put on emerging perspectives in a fast-changing field, where sometimes assumptions and statements made in the past hold no longer true in the present; where just another crisis or government regulation has crashed the dreams of investors; where suddenly AG tech and not farmland is heralded as the most promising new “asset class”, or where methodological advances now suddenly allow us to account in more granular ways about trends and investment footprints in the ‘AG space’. It is also a chance for scholars to revisit their own (past) research in light of recent advances in debates and research findings. We will offer fellow researchers exposure on the platform, as well as graphic design services in case you would like to contribute figures or photos. In this space, guest contributions are published.
Submissions are ordered chronologically. They can also be found in the “Emerging perspectives” section in “Follow the Money“, as well as in “Frictions“, in “Aotearoa New Zealand” and in “Tanzania“.
Clemens Jänicke and Daniel Müller tackle the question of who owns the agricultural land in the federal state of Brandenburg in northeast Germany, part of former East Germany.
Read moreDrawing on years of ethnographic research that culminated in a recent monograph, Youjin B. Chung chronicles the trajectory of a large-scale agricultural investment in Tanzania, putting a particular focus on shifting state-capital relations and the role of international arbitration when capital and the state fall out with each other.
Read moreUntil recently, scholars have solely focused on the assetization of farmland by financial investors, somewhat unnoticing a parallel trend: the rise of investment into ‘digital agriculture’. Emily Duncan tells us more.
Read moreReflecting on their work on land ownership in Central Appalachia, Lindsay Shade and Levi van Sant demonstrate the importance of building grassroots knowledge and solidarity through collaborative action research.
Read moreNorth African and Middle Eastern actors and spaces have received very little coverage in the engagement with the finance-farming-nexus. Marion Dixon’s book The Frontier of Corporate Food in Egypt is an important correction to this geographical bias, offering a deep account of how the corporate food regime manifests itself in one of Africa’s largest economies.
Read moreBuilding on her long-lasting interest in settler-colonial land transformations in Canada, Sarah Rotz focuses on a hitherto neglected topic: The expansion of large-scale agriculture in the country’s north.
Read moreOffering an analysis that bridges the urban and the rural, Alexander Dobeson and Sebastian Kohl attend to recent cracks in the property consensus that have emerged over the past years due to the widespread and conflict-laden assetization of both urban and rural land in the Global North and South.
Read moreRussell Prince, Matt Henry, Michael Mouat and Carolyn Morris take the Fonterra’s pricing practices as a starting point to engage with the question of how we can deal with the social and political character of money and its derivative forms.
Read moreZannie Langford opens our new theme on “intermediaries” – a neglected class in research on the assetization of farmland and agriculture.
Read moreBill Pritchard and Cathy Sherry on the promise and pitfalls of using land titles data to track agricultural land ownership in Australia.
Read moreAnthropologist Julia Sizek’s account underlines the entangled nature of land and water speculation, with the Californian state playing a central role in this.
Read moreAndré Magnan and Annette Aurélie Desmarais show why obtaining and using land titles to study of changing farmland ownership patterns on the Canadian prairies hasn’t been easy.
Read moreAnitra Nelson engages with the social character of money, an “object” largely unquestioned in investment discourses.
Read moreCarla Gras and Andrea P. Sosa Varrotti revisit their work on agri-investments in Latin America.
Read morePartly building on his work in Tanzania, Gideon Tups helps us make sense of the keyword “patient capital”, which has become a buzzword in development finance.
Read moreSociologists Loka Ashwood and Phil Howard engage with the problem of tracing ownership relations along the agri-investment chain.
Read more‘Follow the losses’: Tijo Salverda discusses the temporal dimension of agri-investments for a case in Zambia.
Read moreSamuel Frederico discusses the challenge of ‘following the money’ in the case of Brazilian agri-investments.
Read moreWe are happy to announce that several colleagues from around the world have agreed to contribute to our guest writers’ sections.
Read moreWe are online! Check out our website and guest writer section.
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