Photo Gallery of the 2026 Writeshop

Participants included 52 young scholars and 11 instructors from 30 countries and regions from the Global South. The Writeshop aims to reduce the academic inequalities between the North and South by providing two weeks of systematic training to enhance research capabilities, broaden their academic horizons, and promote more equal knowledge exchange with scholars from the Global North.

Abstract:

This paper examines how activism on agroecology in Brazil contributes to climate justice by responding to climate change through territorially grounded practices. Drawing on empirical stories, it shows how agroecological movements develop locally situated strategies that address the social and ecological impacts of climate change while contesting unequal access to land and means of living. The paper analyses how climate change is inseparable from transformations in agriculture and land access, processes that are central to the Anthropocene, particularly in Latin America. These dynamics reveal how climate change both reflects and intensifies long-standing territorial inequalities, making climate justice a key political concern. By conceptualising climate change as a planetary process and agroecology as a set of locally rooted responses, the paper argues that agroecological activism offers concrete alternatives for organising food systems, livelihoods and human-nature relations. In doing so, it contributes to debates on how societies can inhabit the planet differently, in ways that promote ecological sustainability and collective well-being.

Read their full paper here: https://doi.org/10.3828/whpge.63881453971828

Abstract:

The Government of Kulon Progo Regency and Jogja Magasa Iron, Ltd. announced its sand iron mining plan to the coastal community in Kulon Progo, Yogyakarta in 2006. The coastal farmers refused the plan due to the loss of agricultural land required for mining, as well as its subsequent impacts on the environment and livelihoods and established Paguyuban Petani Lahan Pantai (PPLP) or the “Coastal Farmers Union” to fight the government’s mining plan. The PPLP developed social movements in the coastal areas through rallies, information campaigns, and networking with national and international NGOs. In 2014, the government postponed the mining plan, the future of which remained unclear today. From the initial rejection of the mining proposal, the resistance movement expanded to resist all forms of policy involving coastal land grabbing. The article argues that PPLP’s resistance is a reaction to extractivism developed by the state and public sector. The issue reflects the fifth premise of Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession theory, that accumulation by dispossession encourages struggles. The Indonesian political economy set up the extractivism process that occurred in the context of the sand iron mining plan in Kulon Progo. The mining plan is part of a land grabbing process that provokes the PPLP resistance movement. This study aims to describe the struggle of the PPLP to sustain the coastal land as coastal farming over the neoliberal policy related to mining plans.

Read their full paper here: https://doi.org/10.30641/ham.2026.17.53-66

Abstract:

This article examines how agrarian movements in Southern Africa – particularly in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and South Africa – confront the corporate model of food production and trade. It highlights La Via Campesina Southern and Eastern Africa and the Rural Women’s Assembly as key actors that demand justice beyond the limits of Corporate Social Responsibility and actively construct agroecological economic alternatives that challenge corporate power within the agri-food system.

Read their full paper here: https://doi.org/10.33956/ryqr5941

Abstract:

Broad analyses of social change often overlook the lived experiences of rural Indigenous communities. This paper connects historical agroecology with Participatory Action Research, through collective memory and historical analysis, to examine agroecological transitions in Indigenous communities in Ecuador and Bolivia. The study uses decolonial inquiry to investigate how historical events and sociocultural dynamics shape contemporary food systems, employing river-of-life exercises (with 25 and 27 participants, respectively), 15 interviews per country, participant observation, and archival research. Results highlight that reciprocity-based customary institutions guide social and ecological dynamics shaping landscape and connecting the local to broader solidarity economies. Findings reveal that Caliata adopts a transformative, self-determined path, while Chigani Alto follows an incremental, reformist trajectory within institutional structures. These cases confirm that agroecological transitions are historically grounded and culturally rooted, the ancestral “past” is present. We propose that this approach to Historical Agroecology provides a replicable, culturally appropriate framework for guiding food system transitions.

Read their full article here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-026-10865-x

Abstract:

Indonesia’s new capital city is designed to become a green and sustainable city. In this article, we examine the (un)sustainability of the process through which the city is coming into being. Using the sociospatial theory of planetary urbanization, we trace the dialectical relationship between the new city and sites beyond it to show how bringing a sustainable city into being in East Kalimantan requires other sites to become unsustainable. Through multi-sited fieldwork in Kalimantan and in extraction locations in the adjacent province of Sulawesi, we demonstrate how the making of a sustainable city relies on an unsustainable process of rock extraction elsewhere, reproducing the operational landscape from Kalimantan to Sulawesi. This highlights the importance of translocal geography perspectives for understanding official claims of sustainability in the new city vis-à-vis the grounded realities of planned urban development that generate unsustainability in other places. In terms of theory, we foreground the role of temporality in analyses of planetary urbanization, as reflected in the geological time formation of mined rock transferred to the new city and in the current and future environmental risks incurred in the reproduced operational landscape.

Read their full article here: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.70102

Abstract:

Through the analysis of official documents, the notion of security is identified as central to characterizing the corporate-military dictatorship. By examining the conceptions and demands put forward by rural landowners, bureaucratic technicians, and military officials, we highlight the class and racial dimensions of the dictatorship and its autocratic and paternalistic project of development historically colonial and white.

Read their full article here: https://doi.org/10.25091/S01013300202600010005

While sitting in the Ministry of National Food Security in Islamabad, the Food Commissioner said during the interview:

“There is something called food security, and there is something else too, called food sovereignty and we have to understand both of these things.”

I was really impressed and became extra attentive, thinking that the Pakistani state was making that effort. Great.
Then the Commissioner went on to explain food sovereignty. He said:

“Food sovereignty is this: I am a food-sovereign country in two ways. Number one, I produce my own food and I don’t need to import anything. I am not dependent on anyone. Number two, I don’t produce my own, but I have enough money to import my food items. So these two things provide you with food sovereignty.”

I was confused and started wondering whether I had misunderstood the term. I asked him to clarify, and he then explained food sovereignty (the “something else,” not food security) using mainstream, orthodox economic ideas. I continued to ask myself: was this an appropriation of the term, or did the Food Commissioner simply not understand what food sovereignty actually means?

Boy Dominguez (BoyD) has been creating the cover art for JPS since the special issue on biofuels in 2009. Since then, his paintings have shaped the journal’s visual identity and served as a constant reminder of the political struggles that animate and motivate activist scholarship. BoyD’s work has shaped not just JPS, but the intellectual community of Critical Agrarian Studies more broadly. For decades, he has inspired scholar-activists across our networks through paintings that distill complex political economy into urgent visual testimony. For additional context on BoyD’s life and work, you can read the profile and interview published in JPS in 2022.

BoyD now urgently needs our help. He has been diagnosed with a rare and progressive neurodegenerative disease that has made painting impossible. He and his family are struggling to afford the medical care and 24/7 support his condition now requires. We invite you to donate to the crowdfunding campaign organized by the Philippine Knowledge and Activity Center Netherlands and BoyD’s family.

Learn more about BoyD and donate here:

Thank you for standing with us and with BoyD.

• CASAS collective