Consortium Speaker Series

Credit: Georgina Smith / CIAT

The failure to include gender in the economic history of rural development has severely limited our understanding of the colonial, privatizing and collectivist economic policies that disrupted and transformed the lives of rural women and men in the modern world. This talk will rewrite a piece of that history, exploring rural development in 20th-century Kenya through the lens of women’s labor and land claims. In the course of the 20th-century, Kikuyu women resisted efforts by husbands, fathers, brothers, tribal authorities and the state to control women-cultivated lands. Were these women seeking private land of their own, or were they advancing claims that didn't fit neatly into preconceived capitalist or pre-capitalist categories?

This event is being cosponsored by the UMass Boston CLA Dean's Office; Anthropology Dept; Economics Dept; History Dept; Political Science Dept; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Dept and Human Rights Minor; the Honors College; the Sociology Club; and the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy.

Dr. Mnisi Weeks will discuss the political economy of rural South Africa, drawing from the ethnographic research she conducted for her book Access to Justice and Human Security: Cultural Contradictions in Rural South Africa. Her research reveals how historical conditions and contemporary pressures grounded in severe neglect and harm by the state have resulted in a toxic mix of gender dynamics, intergenerational tensions, and easy accessibility and reliance on firearms as a means of conflict management that has strained traditional justice mechanisms’ ability to deliver the high normative ideals with which they are notionally linked. This prompts her to question what forms of justice are accessible in insecure contexts and what solutions are viable under such volatile human conditions.

This event is being cosponsored by the UMass Boston CLA Dean's Office; Anthropology Dept; Conflict Resolution, Human Security and Global Governance Dept; History Dept; Political Science Dept; Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Dept and Human Rights Minor; the Honors College; the Sociology Club; the William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences; the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy; and the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development.

Drawing from ethnographic research in Sierra Leone, Ryan considers how the language used to encourage and justify large-scale land deals reflects coloniality in its assertion of what counts as ‘good agriculture’ and desirable ‘development.’ While most attention to the “new global land rush” focuses on explaining its relation to historical trends in using land for capital transformation, and its situatedness in global economic processes, Ryan takes a different approach. She analyzes the ways that investing companies, the World Bank, and target countries frame large-scale land deals as having potential to ‘modernize backwards agricultural practices’ and thereby to make agriculture a means of economic development. In this talk Ryan argues that these framings are situated in wider discourses and practices of coloniality, and understanding the conditions that make these investments possible necessitates critical engagement with how the global land rush is both racialized and dependent on vague references to (under)development.

This event is being cosponsored by the UMass Boston CLA Dean's Office; Department of Africana Studies; Department of Anthropology; Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security and Global Governance; Department of Economics; Department of History; Department of Political Science; the Honors College; the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies; and the Africa Scholars Forum.