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ID:
133116
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Publication |
2014.
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Summary/Abstract |
This paper draws from research on small-scale maize production in Mexico's Central Highland region to discuss the geopolitical implications of everyday agricultural practices. An overwhelming majority of maize farmers in this region, as well as in the country more broadly, continue to cultivate locally adapted maize varieties they have bred themselves - criollo maize is the vernacular term - despite decades of concerted government attempts to effect the widespread adoption of commercially bred and licensed hybrid varieties. This state effort to restructure agricultural systems and food security according to nationalist and capitalist priorities is one tactic in a long and violent struggle for control over peasant land and labour in Mexico. By integrating feminist scholarship in geopolitics and in political ecology, I am following the lead of geographers who regard the materialities of everyday life as a foundation for political tensions and conflicts that are constantly unfolding along intersecting lines of difference. Though geopolitics has rarely turned its attention directly to theories of intimate socio-ecological relations, I argue that the field has much analytical and political leverage to gain by engaging with political ecology, and that feminist geographic imaginaries provide a crucial space in which to do so. This approach allows for an analysis of how a dominant geopolitics of land and agriculture is being undermined through the routine production of criollo maize, revealing new potential for creating broad political alliances with social movements that are currently working toward alternative visions of agriculture and food security.
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2 |
ID:
123364
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Publication |
2013.
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Summary/Abstract |
This article presents a theoretical framework that explains how middle-class formation took place through periods of democratic transition in the Philippines and South Korea from the 1970s to 1987. The authors argue that the idea of an inherently "democratic" and even "revolutionary" middle class in the Philippines and South Korea is the product of political alliances, cultural differences, discursive adaptation, and narrative construction-all driven by the political context of the late Marcos (1965-1986) and Chun (1980-1987) regimes. The authors demonstrate this by a close reading of descriptors of the middle class in public discourse, showing how moderate groups and their leftist rivals refined class language over time.
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