Nurturing sustainable agriculture, food and water security discourses through social relations and subjective perspectives

Abstract der Sitzung

Discourses on sustainable agriculture, food and water security often reproduce technocratic and agronomist perspectives while failing to reveal the important role of social relations and human-nature interactions.

We explore how social relations and subjective perspectives on human-nature interactions are fundamental for the understanding of agricultural practices and natural resource management, and, therefore, for addressing the unsustainability of current agricultural systems and food and water security. Qualitative understandings of the human-nature interactions are helpful in complementing existing overly quantified presentations of sustainable farming, water and food security.

We view agriculture, food and water as something we actively experience and live through our own metabolism (cf. Neimanis and Walker, 2014). Subjective understandings of nature reveal perceptions of and responses to food and water. Hence it is local narratives that give valuable insights into farmers’ ways of “weathering” (Neimanis and Walker, 2014) their environment. Following this approach of ‘weathering’, we suggest exploring local narratives to nurture sustainable agriculture, food and water security discourses.

This session’s objective is to critically reflect on existing discourses and to promote greater relatability to contemporary sustainability issues in agriculture through a focus on social relations such as the role of power and gender relations, rural (out‑)migration decisions, intersectionality, collective action, emotional attachment, critical awareness, subjective perspectives on farming and resources, intuition, or human-animal-environment-interactions. Greater relatability can help establish new discourses that balance the hegemonic technocratic discourses on which agricultural policies, public debates and even higher education curricula largely rely on.

We invite researchers to add their perspectives from geography and related fields with suggestions for theoretical and methodological approaches as well as empirical data and implementation strategies that are grounded in social relations or human-nature interactions approaches. With this, we would like to nurture new discourses on sustainable agriculture, food and water security.

References:

Neimanis, A. and Walker, R. L..: Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality, Hypatia, 29, 558–575, https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12064, 2014.