Food Sovereignty: a critical dialogue Yale University, New Haven, CT, September 14-15, 2013 Conference Paper Authors, Keynote and Plenary Speakers, Discussants and Chairs, Organizing Committee & Secretariat short bios Organized by: Yale University Agrarian Studies Program The Journal of Peasant Studies in collaboration with: YALE SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES COUNCIL & Kempf Fund Paper Authors, Keynote and Plenary Speakers, Discussants & Chairs Aaron E. Kappeler, then a student at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, was awarded a grant in April 2009, to aid research on ‘Sowing the State: Land Reform and Hegemony in Rural Venezuela,’ supervised by Dr. Tania Murray Li. This research provides an ethnographic account of the restructuring of agriculture and nation-state in the Bolivarian Revolution. This project investigates the transformation of land tenure relationships and productive activity in light of the challenges faced by reformers after decades of neoliberal policy. Based on 18 months of fieldwork in El Centro Tecnico Productivo Socialista Florentino (an agricultural enterprise located in Barinas in the central plains), the account centers on the enterprise, its operation, and the openings created for subaltern actors in its relations with producer communities and the wider context of state formation. Aeyal Gross is a Professor at the Faculty in Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law. He is also a visiting Reader at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the University of London. Alastair Iles is an Associate Professor of Science, Technology & Environment in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California at Berkeley; and the faculty co-director of the new Berkeley Food Institute. Alder Keleman is a doctoral candidate at Yale University, in a joint PhD program hosted by the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, the Department of Anthropology, and the New York Botanical Gardens. Her multi-disciplinary thesis research examines the relationships linking agrobiodiversity to food security and food culture in Cochabamba, Bolivia. Previously, Ms. Keleman worked in applied agricultural development research at the UN FAO, CIMMYT, and IPGRI. Alexander Nikulin is Professor and Director of the Center for Agricultural Studies of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Moscow, Russia. He specializes in economic and agrarian sociology, history of the peasantry, and the current state of farming in Russia. E-Mail: [email protected] Alison Hope Alkon is assistant professor and chair of the sociology department at the University of the Pacific in Stockton California. Her research examines the ways that local and organic food systems shape and are are shaped by racial and economic identities and inequalities. She is co-editor of Cultivating Food Justice: Race Class and Sustainability and author of Black White and Green: Farmers Markets, Race and the Green Economy, as well as over a dozen articles and chapters on this topic. Amita Baviskar is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. Her research focuses on the cultural politics of environment and development. Her publications include In the Belly of the River: Tribal Conflicts over Development in the Narmada Valley; and the edited volumes Waterscapes: The Cultural Politics of a Natural Resource; Contested Grounds: Essays on Nature, Culture and Power; and (with Raka Ray) Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes. She has taught at the University of Delhi, and has been a visiting scholar at Stanford, Cornell, Yale, the University of California at Berkeley, and Sciences Po, Paris. She was awarded the 2005 Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies, the 2008 VKRV Rao Prize for Social Science Research, and the 2010 Infosys Prize for Social Sciences. Amy Trauger is an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia in Athens. Her work has focused on women farmers, sustainable agriculture and the alternativeness of alternative agriculture. She now is pursuing a research trajectory in food sovereignty and is currently working on the book “We Want Land to Live”: Space, Territory and the Politics of Food Sovereignty to be published by UGA Press in the Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation Series. 1 Anil Bhattarai is currently writing his Ph.D. dissertation on sustainable agriculture in Nepal’s Chitwan valley. Currently based in the Programme in Planning and Department of Geography at University of Toronto, Canada, his scholarly interests include ecological future, creative production, democratization, social justice, sustainable agriculture, public health, ecological designs, and politically engaged scholarship. Besides academic pursuits, he has been writing regular column, (un)commonsense for The Kathmandu Post, an English-language daily broadsheet newspaper (with online presence), since May 2009. During his ethnographic field work in Nepal in 2010-2011, he built a small earthbag home and innovated on washable mud- floors and bamboo crafts, and planted an agroforest in an acre of land. He was actively involved in Citizens Movement for Democracy and Peace during Nepal’s second popular democratic movement in 2005. Annette Aurélie Desmarais is an Associate Professor at the University of Manitoba. She is the author of La Vía Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants (Fernwood Publishing and Pluto Press, 2007) which has been published in various languages. Annette co-edited Food sovereignty: Reconnecting food, nature, and community and Food Sovereignty in Canada. Antonio Roman-Alcalá is an MA student at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague and co-founder of the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance. His work focuses on the intersections of global environmental politics and local deliberative democracy, with food and farming as vehicles for politicaleconomic critique and praxis-based interventions. His interest in participatory action research and improving activist/academic collaboration is reflected in his paper for this conference. Email: [email protected] Antonio Turrent Fernández is a Senior Researcher at Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Forestales, Agrícolas y Pecuarias (INIFAP). Asfia Gulrukh Kamal is a PhD candidate at the Natural Resources Institute, University of Manitoba. Ms. Kamal has a Masters in Cultural Anthropology from University of Manitoba and Masters of Social Science from Women’s Studies, Dhaka University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Her doctoral research focuses on food sovereignty and community economic development with the O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation in northern Manitoba. Barbara Deutsch Lynch is Visiting Associate Professor of International Affairs and City and Regional Planning, Georgia Institute of Technology. Her current research treats watershed governance and conflict in Peru. In 2012 she was Alberto Flores Galindo Visiting Professor, Pontifical Catholic University in Lima. Lynch has written on Latino environmentalisms and agriculture and environment in the Hispanic Caribbean. She edited with Sherrie Baver, Beyond Sand and Sun: Caribbean Environmentalisms. Ben McKay is a PhD candidate at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, Netherlands. His research focuses on the political economy and ecology of land/resource access and control in Bolivia in the context of the rise of Brazil. Ben Orlove is an anthropologist (PhD University of California, Berkeley) who teaches in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia, where he also directs the Master’s Program in Climate and Society and the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions. He has published many books, including the recent Darkening Peaks: Glacier Retreat, Science, and Society. Ben White is Emeritus Professor of Rural Sociology at the International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. He is co-author of “Agrofuels capitalism: a view from political economy” (with A.Dasgupta, 2010), and co-editor of The new enclosures (2012) and Governing the global land grab (2013). He is a founding member of the Land Deal Politics Initiative. Email: [email protected] Bina Agarwal is Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the University of Manchester, UK. Until recently she was Director of the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University. She is also President of the International Society for Ecological Economics. 2 Educated at the Universities of Cambridge and Delhi she has lectured worldwide and held distinguished positions at many universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Michigan, Minnesota (where she held the Winton Chair), and the NYU School of Law. She was Harvard's first Daniel Ingalls Visiting Professor, and later a Research Fellow at the Ash Institute, Kennedy School of Government. Agarwal has been Vice-President of the International Economic Association, President of the International Association for Feminist Economics, on the Board of the Global Development Network, and a member of the Commission for the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, chaired by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz. She served two terms on the UN Committee for Development Policy and is on the editorial boards of many international academic journals. She holds honorary doctorates from the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands and the University of Antwerp in Belgium. Agarwal's research is both theoretical