Date/Time
Date(s) - April 3, 2020
2:00 pm - 3:30 pm
Location
Room 100, Eddy
Categories
“Ways of Knowing for Food Sovereignty: Lessons from Latin America”
Dr. Hannah Wittman
Professor, Land and Food Systems
Professor, Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES)
Academic Director, Centre for Sustainable Food Systems at UBC Farm
University of British Columbia (UBC)
Ontological, epistemological and metabolic rifts between the social and material ‘natures’ of food pose significant dilemmas to social movements, policy makers and researchers alike aiming to assess progress towards food sovereignty. Using examples from recent work in Latin America with a participatory agroecological certification network, I examine the potential of a grassroots science based on the premise of epistemological pluralism to resolve conflicts impeding progress towards food sovereignty and agroecological transitions. Social movements are using an autonomous citizen science, using a wide range of positionalities, approaches, and methods, within an explicit framing of food sovereignty. They aim to make diverse, equitable, and sustainable agroecological landscapes legible to farmers, researchers and policy makers, and to create and honor different ways of knowing through ontological harmonization.
DR. HANNAH WITTMAN’S RESEARCH examines the ways that the rights to produce and consume food are contested and transformed through struggles for agrarian reform, food sovereignty, and agrarian citizenship. Her projects include community-based research on farmland access, transition to organic agriculture, and seed sovereignty in British Columbia, agroecological transition and the role of institutional procurement in the transition to food sovereignty in Ecuador and Brazil, and the role that urban agriculture and farm-to-school nutrition initiatives play in food literacy education. INTERESTS: FOOD SECURITY, POLITICAL ECONOMY
Our annual Sociology-in-Progress (SIP) Colloquia are free and do not require registration. Questions? (970) 491-6044 or SocComm@colostate.edu.