We are pleased to invite you to consider participating in two sessions that we are organizing at the XIV World Congress of Rural Sociology at Ryerson University in Ontario in August 2016. We are organizing:
- a paper session – details below
- an interactive multi-media public dialogue on the “Struggles for the Future of Food”.
If you are interested in either submitting a paper or getting involved in this dialogue, please contact Colin at colin.anderson@coventry.ac.uk.
Please visit the conference website for more general information: http://www.ryerson.ca/arts/irsacongress2016/
Best wishes,
Colin
Call for papers: Food Sovereignty: Participatory, Transdisciplinary and Solidarity Based Research Approaches In-With-For Sustainable and Just Rural Transformation
Food sovereignty represents a politicized and radical vision for rural and food futures that calls for the rights of farmers, indigenous peoples, pastoralists, fisher-folk, fishers, and citizens to determine food and agricultural policy, practice and research. A great deal of knowledge on the practice, politics of food sovereignty is being produced and mobilized by peasants, farmers, indigenous people, and activists themselves. University researchers also have a potentially important, although contested, role in the food sovereignty movement in their capacity facilitate process of knowledge co-production. In the context of deepening ecological, social and economic crises, there are growing calls for university researchers to engage with and support social movements in what is variously referred to as public scholarship, participatory action-research, solidarity research, transdisciplinary research, militant ethnography, and so on. At the heart of these approaches is a transformative research paradigm that views research as a means to support social transformation for a more just and regenerative world. This session will examine, demonstrate and develop a transformative research paradigm as it relates to struggles for food sovereignty and the related struggles for food justice, the right to food, civic food networks and agroecology.
We encourage this as a space for activist and practitioners to autonomously present their work and for university-based researchers to also considering co-presenting their papers with community/civil-society based co-inquirers.
Organizers:
· Colin Ray Anderson, Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, UK
· Balint Balazs, Environmental Social Science Research Group, Hungary
· Rachel Bezner Kerr, Cornell University, USA
· Tom Wakeford, Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, UK
· Christopher Yap, Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, UK