USA: University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and Winrock International Institute for Agricultural Development
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: KerryByrnes1 Document Number: D01303
Notes:
Kerry J. Byrnes Collection, pages 25-34 in Proceedings of Farming Systems Research/Extension Symposium hosted by the University of Arkansas and Winrock International Institute for Agricultural Development, Fayetteville, Arkansas, October 9-12, 1988. Farming Systems Research Paper Series, Paper No. 17. 395 pages.
23 pages., Via online journal., This study draws on a culturally centered collaboration with a community of dalit women farmers in South India who were organized in a cooperative in their collective resistance against the corporatization of agriculture. Situated in the backdrop of the epidemic of farmer suicides in the region, this manuscript examines how those at the margins of global neoliberal transformations symbolically and materially make sense of and resist these transformations. The voices of the women farmers disrupt the underlying neoliberal assumptions that undergird the importation of cash crop agriculture into a subsistence and community-centered farming culture. They depict the ways in which Western cash crop agriculture disrupts community, food security, local health care systems, and the unique gender relations. Moreover, the communication advocacy work carried out by the women seeks to transform agricultural policy through material interventions as alternative practices of agriculture that challenge the hegemony of cash-based individualized agriculture.
