Call for papers: Landgrabbing II

8 March 2012

LDPI is organizing a second workshop on ‘Global Land Grabbing’ in October 2012 in New York. Among the keynote speakers is new Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization José Graziano da Silva. You are invited to send in papers that offer rigorous and innovative analysis.

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Land Deal Politics Initiative (LDPI) is organizing a second international academic workshop on ‘Global Land Grabbing’ to be held on 17-19 October 2012 at the Africana Studies Center at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA. The event will be co-organized and hosted by the Department of Development Sociology. Among the confirmed keynote speakers is the new Director-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Brazilian academic, José Graziano da Silva.

This conference is a follow up to the highly successful 2011 conference held 4-6 April at the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex, Brighton, England (www.future-agricultures.org/land-grab.html). At that conference, 120 papers were presented that sketched the broad outlines of land grabs happening across the globe. A convergence of factors has been driving a revaluation of land by powerful economic and political actors. This is occurring across the world, but especially in the global South. As a result, we are seeing a dramatic rise in the extent of cross-border, transnational corporation-driven and foreign government-driven, large-scale land deals unfolding worldwide. The phrase ‘global land grab’ has become a catch-all phrase to describe this explosion of (trans)national commercial and government-driven land transactions revolving around the production and sale of food and biofuels, conservation and mining activities

The purpose of the 2012 conference is to continue deepening and broadening our understanding of global land deals. As before, we remain open to broader topics around land grab intersections with political economy, political ecology and political sociology, and will convene a series of parallel sessions on a range of themes responding to the issues as described in the attached pdf.

The organizers invite papers that offer rigorous and innovative analysis of this list of issues. Papers based on recent, original field research are especially welcomed. We also encourage comparative studies. We welcome proposals for thematic panels. Doctoral students and younger researchers, particularly from the global South, are especially encouraged to participate.

Instructions for submission of paper abstracts (200 words)
The deadline for the Call for Papers is 31 May.
Please submit abstracts and requests for additional information to: landpolitics@gmail.com
For thematic panel proposals, please submit a page long argument of why the panel is relevant and important. Proposed papers for the panel will be reviewed in the same manner as individual abstracts.
For paper abstracts, include your full contact details (email, tel/fax) as well as your institutional affiliation.

Some papers presented at the workshop will be selected and considered for publication in The Journal of Peasant Studies, which is SSCI ranked, and possibly other journals. For more information about the journal and to request a free sample copy go to: www.tandf.co.uk/journals/jps

Travel grants

We have a very modest fund for travel grants for successful applicants coming from universities/research institutions located in the Global South. For the rest, we will be unable to provide travel grants. But we will be able to provide free lunches and snacks at the conference for all conference participants. At a later date, we will provide information about various options on affordable student rate hostels in Ithaca.

The LDPI was established by a group of five: Jun Borras, with the Initiatives in Critical Agrarian Studies (ICAS) of the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in the Hague (Netherlands); Ian Scoones, with the Future Agricultures Consortium whose Secretariat is based at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex (UK); Ruth Hall, with the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) of the University of the Western Cape (South Africa); Ben White, with The Resources, Environments and Livelihoods (RELIVE) cluster at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in the Hague (Netherlands); and Wendy Wolford, with the Polson Institute of Global Development of Cornell University (USA).

Call for papers: Land Grabbing Cornell Conference [PDF, 235KB]

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