AgroecologyNow!

What’s Up With Agroecology Now!? 2020/11 Update

See below for some highlights of our latest work, including free-to-download articles and videos. Please pass some or all of this on to your networks or to copy/adapt parts for use in newsletters, etc. There are also a number of recent and freely downloadable articles listed at the end of the email. * Posts marked with a star include upcoming events you may wish to join in on.

Announcing a new Column at AgroecoloyNow! – “Agroecology in Motion: Nourishing Transformation”

We have launched a new column at AgroecologyNow!. Our aim is to create a platform for bold ideas relayed through succinct, creative and compelling writing that stretches the boundaries of thinking and action to nourish a transformative agroecology. It will include articles that stimulate reflection and learning, inform political-practical work on agroecology and move people to action. The column will be provocative and inspiring, international in scope and connected with agroecology happenings all over the world. The first article in the column lays the groundwork for future contributions: https://wp.me/p67WNH-GF  

Seeking New Agreements for Working with Nature through Enhancing Agricultural Biodiversity

In this inaugural piece in our new column, Agroecology in Motion, Patrick Mulvany, calls for the radical foregrounding of a transformative understanding of agricultural biodiversity. This approach could herald new ways of agreeing how we should work with nature, led by peasants, Indigenous Peoples and other food producers as the everyday experts, stewards and champions of agricultural biodiversity. This call to action will help tune activists, researchers, policy-makers and other actors into the need to democratise and transform the governance of agricultural biodiversity. https://wp.me/p67WNH-FG. 

* Join us at the Oxford Real Farming Conference 2021 

This year the ORFC is going online and global with a 7-day programme (7-13 Jan) of talks and workshops from across the world. The event will give food and farming activists, including producers, researchers, policy-makers and NGOs the chance to exchange ideas, learn from each other and form new alliances.  It will also provide space to organise ahead of the climate ministers and heads of state gathering, COP26, which the UK is hosting in Glasgow in November 2021. AgroecologyNow and CAWR  will be a part of 6+ presentations, workshops and interactive sessions on:

  • Agroecology Financing: From Tweaking to Transformation …! 
  • Exporting Technofixes, Colonialism and Resistance
  • Can agriculture be decolonised? Opportunities and obstacles for agroecology
  • Building farmers capacity in the context of urbanisation: political pedagogies for urban agroecology
  • Subtle Agroecologies: Farming with the Hidden Half of Nature
  • Organizing For Food Sovereignty in the Belly of the Beast: The Experience of the US Food Sovereignty Alliance

Registration for delegates from majority world countries will be free. View more about our sessions at https://wp.me/p67WNH-Ft and see the wider slate of offerings and get tickets at https://orfc.org.uk. 

Connecting the dots of agroecology and food sovereignty

This podcast discusses food sovereignty and agroecology in different contexts – From poultry plants in the US South exploiting low-wage workers, to the slow violence of pesticides in Punjab causing premature disability to the European food sovereignty movement and peasant rights activism- scholars, Carrie Freshour, Divya Sharma and CAWR’s Barbara Van Dyck join the WBI show to connect the dots of agroecology across places. https://tinyurl.com/yydqqol9.

Decolonising the Curriculum? Reflecting on Possibilities and Contradictions at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience

The decolonising the curriculum movement represents a profound challenge to universities and a call for introspection and action. This article shares the reflections that emerged at a CAWR workshop to discuss the contradictions and possibilities of enacting decoloniality and equity in the academy. Click here to access our own related multimedia ‘resource list’ on Decolonising the Curriculum. https://wp.me/p6tuKo-1cZ 

* Resourcing and Financing Agroecology – New Page, Resources and Upcoming Webinar

How can transitions towards agroecology be ‘financed’. Our growing stream of research at AgroecologyNow on Financing and Resourcing Agroecology is critically examining the role of public and philanthropic donors in agroecology transitions. We are looking at both the quantity (and often the lack) of funds allocated to agroecology. We are also especially concerned with the quality of financing approaches and specifically how they can support a transformative agroecology. Also, this page lists the growing number of studies that explicitly study the extent to which agroecology is being financed through different agricultural development and research programs. Visit the website to sign up for two webinars on this stream of research (one on November 26  and another in January as a part of ORFC as mentioned above). View more here: https://wp.me/P67WNH-C8 

Call for Interest for Special Issue – Participatory Action Research in Times of COVID

We are organizing a Special Issue on the topic of “Doing Participatory Action Research (PAR) in a time of COVID and Beyond”. Our idea is to submit it to Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems. We encourage scholar-activists or researcher-practitioners from within social networks and scholarship to co-author work that raises important questions about how we might think about and approach our work differently. Click here for more details: http://www.agroecologynow.com/par-covid/.

Call for Abstracts: Special Issue on Women’s Communal Land Rights – December 11 deadline 

We are interested in submissions that critically analyze efforts, by a range of actors, to advance communal land rights in different spaces and at different levels, and what this means for women and youth. This will become part of a Research Topic edited by Priscilla Claeys, Stefanie Lemke and Juana Camacho in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, sub-section Social Movements, Institutions and Governance. To check it out and submit an abstract, click here: https://tinyurl.com/y62rnwwu 

Pivoting from Local Food to Just Food Systems in Special Farming Matters Issue on Agroecology and Feminism

They are advancing economic models based on feminist and degrowth economics that move far beyond the profit-motive of capitalist economic logic. This article discusses the surge in interest in ‘local food’ in the wake of COVID. It argues that social movements are doing critical work in coordinating and amplifying the political dimensions of local food by shifting from individual to collective, exclusive to inclusive, and technical to political to confront corporate power and other intersecting oppressions. Read here: https://wp.me/p67WNH-DW. This article was originally published the Farming Matters Special Issue on Agroecology and Feminism published by CIDSE, Cultivate!, and the AgriCultures network. 

AgroecologyNow! Publications (click through to access)

Highlighted Publications, Events and Updates From our Networks