September 10
Rebecca Solnit
Author and Independent Scholar
“Standing on Top of Golden Hours: Catastrophe, Revolution, Carnival, and the Suspension of Everyday Life”
*paper no longer available online
September 17
Nina Planck
Local Foods, New York City
“Beyond Farmers’ Markets: The Market for Local Foods”
September 24
John Varty
Environmental Studies, Queen’s University
“First the Loaf: A Hybrid History of Wheat Improvement”
October 1
Michael Mahoney
History, Yale University
“Jolling and Brawling: The Beer Party and Intra-Subaltern Conflict in Late Colonial Natal, South Africa, 1879–1906”
October 8
Lei Guang
Political Science, San Diego State University
“Creating Rural-Urban Boundaries in China: Rural Workers in Cities and State Re-rustication Campaigns from the 1950s to the 1990s”
*paper no longer available online
October 15
John Grin
Political Science, University of Amsterdam
“Radical Agricultural Reform in the Netherlands as Reflexive Modernization”
October 22
Edward Friedman
Political Science, University of Wisconsin
Mark Selden
East Asia Program, Cornell University
“Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China: A Quarter Century of Unlearning Certain Realities of Rural Life”
*paper no longer available online
October 29
Jonathan Fox
Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz
“Reframing Mexican Migration as a Multiethnic Process”
November 5
Fred Kirschenmann
Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, Iowa State University
“The Current State of Agriculture: Does It Have a Future?”
November 12
Rubie Watson
Director, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology
“The Lord’s Kitchen: Church, Community, and Family Farms in Rural Illinois”
November 19
Kate Meagher
Nuffield College, Oxford University
“Social Capital or Analytical Liability?: Social Networks and African Informal Economies”
December 3
Caroline Humphrey
Social Anthropology, Cambridge University
“Cosmopolitanism, Socialist Internationalism, and kozmopolitizm in Multiethnic Russia”
January 14
Harriet Friedmann
Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto
“Modernity and the Hamburger: Cattle and Wheat in Ecological and Culinary Change”
January 21
Wendy Wolford
Geography, University of North Carolina
“‘Every Monkey Has Its Own Head’: Rural Sugarcane Workers and the Politics of Becoming a Peasant in Northeastern Brazil”
January 28
James L. Wescoat, Jr.
Landscape Architecture, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“Landscape Heritage: Conservation, Conflict, and Conciliation in Gujarat”
*paper no longer available online
February 4
Karl Zimmerer
Geography, University of Wisconsin, Madison
“From Natural History to Environmental Science: Mapping Landscape and Nature in the Andes”
*paper not available online
February 11
Dorothy Hodgson
Anthropology, Rutgers University
“Being Maasai, Becoming ‘Indigenous’: Transnational Advocacy and the Politics of Representation, Recognition, Resources, and Rights”
February 18
Kenneth Pomeranz
History, University of California, Irvine
“The Economics of Respectability: Gender Division of Labor and Rural Livelihoods in Late Imperial China”
February 25
Laura Lovett
History, University of Massachusetts/Amherst
“‘Fitter Families for Future Firesides’: Popular Eugenics and the Construction of a Rural Family Ideal in the United States?
March 4
Jose Bove
Confederation Paysanne, France
“Via campesina, or Building an International Farmers’ Movement against Neoliberal Policies and for the Right to Food Sovereignty”
*special event; paper not available online
March 25
John Fraser Hart
Geography, University of Minnesota
“The Changing Scale of American Agriculture”
April 1
Scott Guggenheim
World Bank
“Big Development in Little Communities: Reflections on Social Change in Transitional Indonesia”
April 8
Lauren Leve
Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
“Liberal Values, ‘Failed Development,’ and Rural Revolution in Nepal: The Radical Politics of Women’s Empowerment”
April 15
Jan-Bart Gewald
African Studies Centre, Leiden University
“Transformations in Transport in Zambia: Preliminary Ideas Regarding a Social History of the Motorcar in Zambia, 1890-1940”
April 22
Maria Farland
English and American Literature, Fordham University
“Robert Frost, the ‘Degenerate’ Farmer, and the Elevations of Scientific Agriculture”
*paper no longer available online