ONLINE: Facing the Environmental Mission: Small Farmers in Nicaragua and the Agro-Ecological Challenges of the Neoliberal Food Regime

press release: Please join UW Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program for the LACIS Lunchtime Lecture, Tuesdays at noon. The events will be virtual (on Zoom) for the 2020-21 school year, and are free and open to the public.

Presented by: Birgit Muller, (PhD Cambridge 1986) is a Research Director at the IIAC/LAIOS, CNRS, and Professor at the EHESS in Paris.

About the presentation: The efforts of small development NGOs to introduce agro-ecology in remote and mountainous regions of Nicaragua categorized as fragile and barely fit for agriculture, create structures of surveillance and control that challenge the ideal of peasant autonomy. I will examine the national and international compensation schemes that influence these practices and create chains of governance on a global scale.

About the presenter: Birgit Müller (PhD Cambridge 1986) is research director at the IIAC/LAIOS, CNRS and professor at the EHESS in Paris. Her current research explores how farmers, soils and seeds make out in the new global conjunctures of climate smart agriculture — the private and public agricultural policy making by states, corporations and a large array of international governmental and non-governmental organisations. She sets out to understand local quotidian practices of farmers, as they wrestle with supra-local processes and discursive practices that connect local life-worlds in two farming settings, in Canada and Nicaragua, that all seem to oppose. Among her books: Disenchantment with Market Economics. East Germans and Western Capitalism (2008), The Gloss of Harmony. The politics of policy-making in multilateral organisations (2013).

Please register HERE. Once you are registered, you will have access to the Zoom meeting shortly before the presentation begins.

About the series: This lecture is part of “Science and Technology in the Hispanic World”, a special seminar series prepared in collaboration between the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies and LACIS.

How do science and technology affect Hispanic societies and ecosystems? How does cultural inheritance inform citizens’ attitudes towards science-driven technological projects? How do science and technology from the North, and their hybrid local forms, mobilize indigenous science to resist undesired transformations? What are the culturally specific debates and conflicts that emerge in various local contexts where science and technology bring changes? This series features renowned scholars and activists to introduce science and technology-driven social debates in Spain, Mexico, Paraguay, and Nicaragua.