Bram Büscher

Dan Brockington and I are organising a special feature in the Journal of Peasant Studies on bridging critical agrarian studies and political ecology:

Bridging Critical Agrarian Studies and Political Ecology: A call for papers for Journal of Peasant Studies

Critical agrarian studies and political ecology are both known for their in-depth analyses of rural and more-than-rural transformation processes. Both look at diverse aspects of environmental change, livelihood change and capital accumulation and both study how people deal with, influence and relate to these changes. But they have done so with different emphases, looking at similar phenomena through different lenses. Critical agrarian studies has focused more on class dynamics and its impacts on rural peasantries and the rural poor. Political ecology traditions has entailed less attention to class, and more to local environmental knowledge, representations of environmental change, conservation politics and the like.

Clearly the two fields (could) overlap a good deal, but their epistemic communities, debates and questions are still too distinct. They tend to publish in different journals, only occasionally go to the same conferences or sessions and rarely come together in research projects. At the same time, they take theoretical inspiration from some of the same thinkers and share a professed deep interest in the material environments that make distinctive social dynamics possible. Despite these common interests they have so been more frequently characterised by their differences than their common work.

Such divisions are unsatisfying in and of themselves. They become particularly unfortunate in eras of rising green grabs, which bring conservation studies (a traditional political ecology domain) more firmly into the class dynamics of the rural poor (and the domain of agrarian studies); ever more complicated value chains and production networks, and the proliferation of representations that these entail on the internet and social media which again means that discourse and image analysis (associated with political ecology) becomes embroiled in rural production systems and rural capitalism (associated with agrarian studies).

We seek to transcend these academic divides with contributions that draw on both traditions. We invite papers that take on this challenge, that will be submitted as a special section to the Journal of Peasant Studies. The purpose of this collection is to illustrate what becomes possible by bridging these divides. Between 3 and 5 papers will be submitted for review. We will look for a geographical diversity of interests, for papers which are able to set research agendas. This means that we are less interested in case-studies per se. Rather we want arguments which synthesise across a variety of cases, or which use empirical material to illustrate larger arguments.

Authors interested in contributing should submit titles and 300-400 word abstracts by Monday July 10^th  2018 jointly to Dan Brockington and Bram Büscher (emails below). Selected contributions will be required by Feb 28^th 2019 and will be peer-reviewed.

d.brockington AT sheffield.ac.uk; bram.buscher AT wur.nl.