September 11
William T. Rowe
Chinese History, The Johns Hopkins University
“Bao Shichen: An Early Nineteenth-Century Chinese Agrarian Reformer”
September 18
Verlyn Klinkenborg
Editorial Board, The New York Times
“A Compilation of Pieces about Farming and Its Issues”
September 25
Courtney Jung
Political Science, University of Toronto
“Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the History of Mexican Indigenous Politics”
October 2
A.R. Vasavi
National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore
“Suicides and the Making of India’s Agrarian Distress”
October 9
Jonathan Harwood
History of Science and Technology, University of Manchester “Why Have Green Revolutions So Often Neglected Peasant-Farmers?”
“Why Have Green Revolutions So Often Neglected Peasant-Farmers?”
October 16
Felix Wemheuer
Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University
“The Politicization of Hunger: Food and peasant-state relation in China (1949-1962)”
*paper no longer available online
October 23
Diana Mincyte
College of Communications, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
“Milk, Machines, and Mobility: The Politics of Subsistence Economies in Europeanizing Lithuania Lithuania”
October 30
Saturnino (Jun) Borras
International Development Studies, St. Mary’s University, Halifax
“The Politics of Contemporary (Trans)national Commercial Land Deals: Competing Views, Strategies and Alternatives”
November 6
Kregg Hetherington
Sociology and Social Anthropology, Dalhousie University
“Guerrilla Auditors and Duplicitous Documents: Information, Transparency and Land Struggles in Paraguay”
November 13
Erik Harms
Anthropology, Yale University
“Social Demolition: Creative Destruction and the Production of Value in Vietnamese Land Clearance”
November 20
Jake Kosek
Geography, University of California, Berkeley
“The Natures of the Beast: On the New Uses of the Honey Bee”
*paper no longer available online
December 4
Michael Docter
The Food Bank Farm
“Food Bank Farm: A Twenty-Year Effort to Reduce Hunger and Localize Food Supply”
note: the PDF for this session consists of scanned clippings and articles. It is offered in two versions: (1) for uniform printing on letter size paper, and (2) for optimal screen viewing, where small print can be enlarged in your browser or PDF viewer for legibility.
January 15
Martin Jones
Archaeology, University of Cambridge
“The Ecology of Empire: Food, Community and Network in the Classical Roman Landscape”
January 22
Sarah Washbrook
St. Antony’s College, Oxford
“Modernizing the State or Re-enforcing Tradition? Indian Communities and Political Centralization in Rural Chiapas, 1876–1914”
January 29
Charles Postel
History, San Francisto State University
“The Populist Context: Texas Cotton Farmers and Religious Conflict, 1880–1900”
February 5
Alissa Hamilton
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP)
“Fabricated Fresh”
February 12
Karen Seto
School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University
“From Farms to Factories: Transformations of Landscapes and Livelihoods in Urbanizing Asia”
*paper no longer available online
February 19
Kimberly Theidon
Anthropology, Harvard University
“Histories of Innocence: Post-War Stories in Peru”
February 26
Matthew Garcia
American Civilization, Ethnic Studies, and History, Brown University
“The Importance of Being Asian: Growers, the United Farm Workers, and the Rise of Colorblindness”
March 5
Henry Bernstein
Development Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
“Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change: Writing a ‘Little Book on a Big Idea’”
March 26
Annu Jalais
Arts and Humanities Research Council, Bengal Muslim Diaspora Project
“Bengali, but not Bhadralok”
*paper no longer available online
April 2
Good Friday
April 9
Yuka Suzuki
Anthropology, Bard College
“The Leopard’s Black and White Spots: Nature, Metaphor, and Poetics”
April 16
Ponciano del Pino
History, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos
“‘In the name of the government’: Community Politics, Violence and Memory in Modern Peru”
April 23
Anand Pandian
Anthropology, The Johns Hopkins University
“Ripening with the Earth: On Maturity and Modernity in South India”