On the 17th and 18th of July, the University of Kassel, Witzenhausen/ Kassel, Germany is organising a workshop on “Sustainable Agroecology: Governance, practices, potentials, and tensions in a comparative perspective”.
The workshop series aims to gather evidence on conditioning factors of sustainable agroecologies, related practices and transformative pathways, as well as the tensions and conflicts of the multi-scalar politics of agroecological transitions. For that purpose, it aims to mobilize cases and insights from a diversity of regions worldwide.
The workshop series is an initiative of the “Agriculture, Ecology and Societies program” and the DAAD-funded Global Partnership Network of University of Kassel, as well as the DAAD-funded AURORA (Sustainable Agriculture and social-ecological systems approaches in higher education in the MENA region) project, which aims to map sustainable agroecology in diverse social-ecological, historical and geo-political contexts.
Workshops will be organized by partners in three main locations: Merida (Mexico), Beirut (Lebanon) (t.b.c.) and Kassel (Germany). Scholars and empirical work from the regions of Latin America, Middle East and Northern Africa, India and Europe are invited.
Particularly, organizers invite contributions on or inspired by the following questions:
- What makes agriculture sustainable? What local, political and social factors contribute to the emergence and maintenance of sustainable agricultures
- What is considered agroecology by whom in particular social-ecological contexts and what are modes of agroecological practice and types of agroecological systems and their role in food systems?
- What are the political, social, institutional, economic, knowledge sharing and social-ecological factors facilitating emergence and farmers’ use of agroecological practices and what are tensions and conflicts accompanying them
- What are context-specific evolutionary pathways of agroecological transformations and their politics – and what can we learn from these pathways for transformation and its potential mainstreaming across a wider region
- What are the ways that international and national political-economic contexts affect agroecology, and how do recent inter- and transnational initiatives at sustainable farming relate to agroecological practices in different contexts?
Submissions (currently only for the Kassel Workshop, 17 & 18 July 2023) & funding:
500 words abstracts + indication of contributors and affiliation are invited for submission by
28 April to lthiemann@uni-kassel.de