Invitation to Apply for "Nature, |Agri|Culture & the Quest for Sustainable Food Systems: A Master Class in Political Ecology"

Humans have continuously interacted with nature, resulting in the formation and development of coupled human-natural systems. Yet food has become distant from the ecosystems that support all human life. Moreover, landscapes and seascapes worldwide have been increasingly simplified and homogenized. Attempts to re-embed human food-getting in nature, such as agroecology, regenerative farming, and permaculture, are labeled “alternative” even though supposedly “conventional” agriculture, which replaces ancient human-natural cycles with chemicals and fossil fuels, is really recent.

Only in the 1950s did converted weapons of war – nitrogen and poisons – and machines driven by fossil fuels begin to replace farming that had evolved for millennia within the matrix of self-organizing forests, coasts, and grasslands. “Environment” became an issue in the 1970s as governments awoke to looming threats to life. The foundational international institutions created in the 1990s divided these into “climate” – the changing balance of gases in the atmosphere – and “biodiversity” – the declining vitality of species and ecosystems. At present, highly contested visions exist over this division and how to “manage” land use and food security/hunger – with related discussions on the role of animals in agriculture and diets, “climate-smart agriculture,” and markets in “ecosystem services” that are created parallel to “carbon markets.” 

In 2022, agribusiness corporations appeared for the first time at both climate and biodiversity negotiations, where they promoted what they called “nature-based” solutions to the problems their industries had created. Critics described this as ‘greenwashing’ and “smoke and mirrors” (IPES-Food 2022). The new institutions eventually began to hear voices by farmers, social movements, and ecologists that proclaimed that industrial agriculture is creating a new unity between climate and extinction, which is disastrous for all life, and that only by strengthening the social forces that support biodiversity-friendly farming can we hope to slow or reverse what’s being called the Sixth Extinction. 

Aims of the Master Class

This Master Class aims to spark a critical conversation with academics and practitioners interested in deepening their research and practice into intertwined social and ecological processes, particularly in relation to what policies and practices can be mobilized to change the dominant agricultural model.   

By focusing on agriculture, this Master Class will explore the crucial debate over how to replace industrial monocultural agriculture. Conservation biology imagines humans as separate from self-organizing ecosystems and sees our species as intrinsically destructive. Agroecology imagines humans as special parts of nature, guiding landscapes as a matrix of diverse, small-scale agricultural ecosystems, providing opportunities for stewardship of landscapes by local farmers. As a window into the vast field of Political Ecology, the debate between Conservation and Agroecology is timely, indeed urgent. A helpful focus that seeks to make this conflict explicit is the idea of “land-sparing” or reduction, even abolition of agriculture, versus agriculture embedded in ecosystems (geared toward the sustainability of managed landscapes), or “land-sharing.”

We therefore ask: 

• Should sustainable human foodgetting aim to banish intrinsically destructive humans, to “re-wild” huge places on Earth and, in doing so, staunch the haemorrhaging of biodiversity, as argued by E.O. Wilson (2016)? Or can humans steward landscapes as a matrix of diverse, small-scale agricultural ecosystems re-embedded with forests, grasslands and other ecosystems, as argued by Vandermeer and Perfecto (2019, 2024)? 
   
• How solid is the argument that nature should be protected from people? Or should we rather sustain the argument that, under proper ecological and socio-political conditions, biodiversity can persist and even thrive in productive agricultural systems? 
   
• Where should conservation energy be placed at the present time? Could agriculture “in the matrix” be considered key to the overall conservation agenda, as well as in achieving environmental and social justice? 

References
IPES-Food, 2022. Smoke and Mirrors: Examining competing framings of food system sustainability: agroecology, regenerative agriculture, and nature-based solutions
Perfecto, I., Vandermeer, J. and Wright, A., 2019. Nature's Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Biodiversity Conservation and Food Sovereignty, 2^nded., Routledge.  
Vandermeer, J. and Perfecto, I., 2024. The Dialectical Agroecologist, Cambridge.
Wilson, E.O. 2016.  Half Earth, Norton.

PROVISIONAL PROGRAM

Dates:  28-30 May 2025

Location:  The American University of Rome, Rome

Language: English will be the working language of the Master Class.

Wednesday, May 28
10.30 am – 1.00 pm (lecture, group reading, discussion)
2.00 – 4.30 pm (reporting from the field: presentation and  discussion of case studies)

Thursday, May 29
10.30 am – 1.00 pm (lecture, group reading, discussion)
2.00 – 4.30 pm (reporting from the field: presentation and  discussion of case studies)

Friday, May 30
10.00 am – 1.00 pm (plenary session with moderated discussion, final remarks)

HOW TO APPLY

Academics and practitioners are invited to apply using the form below and including their CV and a short statement of interest that: 

1. Includes who they are in terms of disciplinary background and education
2. Outlines specific research experiences they would like to discuss 
3. Details UN or other official reports they consider important, useful, or problematic
4. Covers key questions for policies connecting nature conservation with agriculture. 

A maximum of 20 academic and professional participants will be provided with the references of a small number of readings in advance. Participants are warmly encouraged to bring cases or teaching materials to workshop discussions. Participants will examine their own and other case studies using various methodologies, which may include multiscalar analysis, ethnography, political-economic analysis, historical, and discourse analysis. 

Applications from different disciplinary fields will be considered, including, but not limited to, sociology, anthropology, geography, Science and Technology Studies (STS), development studies, political theory, economics, forestry, agronomy, environmental history, feminist, and postcolonial studies.