Industrial agriculture is directly responsible for enormous social, environmental and climate damage in the world today. Land concentration and peasant/farmer dispossession ruin communities and dislocate populations and ecologies, while scientifically driven farming degrades the soil, water and air, undermines biological diversity, and generates disastrous consequences for the long-term health of humans. Drawing upon key perspectives in ecology, political economy, and environmental history, this panel explores such issues from several key conceptual, methodological, and normative viewpoints with an eye not only toward critical diagnosis, but also to explore possibilities to recast this inescapably foundational domain of human life in socially just and environmentally sustainable ways.

Planetary Urbanization, Nature’s Matrix, and the Struggle for a New Agriculture
Ivette Perfecto, University of Michigan

Narratives of Crisis and Change in the History of Industrial Agriculture
Helen Anne Curry, Georgia Tech

Agrarian Questions and National Liberation in a Warming World: Paths to the Future, North and South
Max Ajl, Ghent University

Introductions and moderation by Gary Herrigel.

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This event was part of the inaugural CEGU conference, Environmental Emergencies, Emergent Environments: Critical Perspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities, held April 20–21, 2023 at The University of Chicago.

About the Conference:

The climate crisis unfolds through a series of environmental emergencies at once abrupt and long-churning. These emergencies are deeply interwoven and yet, at the same time, engender unique and emergent environments of disaster, struggle, and social reinvention. How might we understand the roots of these transformations while attending to the particular environments where emergency erupts? How, in other words, might we think environmental emergencies and emergent environments together?

CEGU’s inaugural conference brings together scholars from across the social sciences and humanities—including agrarian studies, digital humanities, ecology, environmental history, geography, literature, planning, and urban sociology—to dialogue and debate about these issues, their historical genealogies, and future implications. The conference opens with the inaugural Calvin and Freda Redekop Lectures in Environment and Society and will feature panels on agrarian environments, spatial media, urbanization, and waste with leading scholars in conversation with CEGU faculty.

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cegu.uchicago.edu