DSOC 7500

Food, Ecology, and Agrarian Change

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2020-2021.

This seminar is concerned with agri-food systems and their socio-ecological relations. Modernization narratives, in casting agriculture as an original baseline of human development, have (inadvertently or not) consigned agriculture, and food, to the margins of social thought and analysis. The current crisis of the global food economy has focused attention and public discourse on agriculture, and its increasingly evident health and ecological implications. This seminar works with analytical approaches and contemporary issues and processes concerning food, ecology and agrarian change. Pressing health and ecological questions, in addition to the latest food crisis, are forcing a new look at the agri-food system and its social and environmental functions. The goal of the seminar is to develop analytical perspectives on the relationships embedded in food and agrarian systems and their political, social and ecological implications, and to explore various alternatives to the dominant mode of agriculture and agrarian relations.

When Offered Spring.

Permission Note Enrollment limited to: graduate students.

Course Attribute (CU-SBY)

• Discuss analytical perspectives on the relationships embedded in food and agrarian systems and their political, geopolitical and ecological implications.
• Propose alternatives to the dominant mode of agriculture and agrarian relations.
• Produce a term paper that addresses theoretical and/or empirical questions around a seminar topic or theme.

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