This contribution draws on a feminist experience developed in 2025 as part of the Omega Resilience Awards initiative and rooted in a broader process of university extension and collaborative knowledge production with grassroots collectives across Uruguay. Using body-territory mapping as a collective feminist methodology, we examine how women narrate and make visible the impacts of land and water dispossession, environmental contamination, and multiple forms of violence, while highlighting the networks of care, resistance, and solidarity through which life is sustained in their territories. This piece contributes to broader debates on territorial defense, feminist struggles, and alternatives to extractivist development models in the Global South, while offering insights into feminist methodologies that foster collective reflection, situated knowledge production, and processes of resistance and collective care.

Abstract:

In Uruguay, a series of transformations have taken place that threaten the sustainability of family, peasant, and community-based agriculture, agroecology, and careful ways of inhabiting territories, in the face of the dominant extractivist model. These are contexts in which extractivist practices have caused varying degrees of harm to the fabric of life—impacting communities and the ways in which relationships between human and more-than-human lives are built. Focusing on social struggles in recent years, we observe that resistance to dispossession and structural crises is becoming increasingly central. In particular, the leading role of women has become more visible in defending life, the health of territories, land, and water—denouncing contamination and poisoning in the hands of agribusiness, as well as land concentration in the hands of real estate speculation. Our aim has been to make visible the ways in which life is sustained and territories are inhabited through the networks woven by the women with whom we have been working. We understand these networks as ties and spaces of encounter built throughout their lives.

Read their full paper here: https://www.agrariansouth.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/ASN-RB-April-June-2026_1.pdf

CASAS, a network of over 400 academics from around the world, is launching a global campaign supporting Colombia’s Agrarian Reform against far-right backlash.

The Colombian Agrarian Reform achieved historical gains: 280,000 ha restituted, 779,000 ha redistributed, 2 million ha formalized, and 25 peasant territories recognized. Through restitution, redistribution, recognition, and regulation, Colombia proved agrarian justice is possible.

Now, the new far-right government threatens to dismantle these achievements. Peasant, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant leaders are being threatened and criminalized, facing escalating threats. Furthermore, public servants implementing land reform are being targeted.

As academics and scholar-activists, we demand protection for defenders and respect for territorial rights.

Sign the petition here (EN/ES): https://bit.ly/4vKX78i

Land is life, defend Agrarian Reform

CASAS Collective.

Cuba is in the grip of a punishing economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the United States for over 60 years. It has affected electricity generation, transport, healthcare and food distribution. Now, Washington is tightening the screws once again, intending to destroy Cuba’s revolutionary project, subjugating its people through hunger, medicine shortages and the disruption of daily life.

Cuba has given the world far more than it has received: doctors in the most remote corners of the globe, life-saving vaccines, literacy brigades that taught millions of people to read, inspiration and support for cooperative organisation, the widespread adoption of agroecology and, in all of this, growing solidarity and humanist internationalism to build a fairer and more sustainable world. Now, as the U.S attempts to collectively punish an entire nation for refusing to bow down, it is up to us to repay that solidarity with strength and determination.

La Via Campesina is organising a fundraiser to support the Cuban peasantry in their struggles. Your donations will go directly to the Small Farmers National Association (ANAP), Cuba’s national peasant organisation and a member of La Vía Campesina.

The ANAP is already in the process of building food and energy sovereignty through agroecology. Your contributions will further help ANAP peasant families to install irrigation and renewable energy systems, expand agroecological production, diversify local seed systems and strengthen small-scale cooperative processing to consolidate the production of healthy and nutritious food in a sustainable manner and ensure the people’s food supply. The funds will also be used to purchase medicines, essential supplies and educational materials, prioritising women, children and older people in vulnerable areas.

La Vía Campesina intends to raise 100,000 EUR to provide humanitarian aid to the people of Cuba through the link below:

Please share this call with anyone interested in showing their support for the Cuban peasantry.

Abstract:

The erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir is home to one of the largest pastoral transhumance communities in the Himalayas. There is a need to situate state education policy for tribes against the specific mode of production involving nomadic pastoralism and ecological labour. This phenomenon of Transhumance existence acts as an anchor against which the lived experience of the Bakarwal tribe can be located, and any impact of the former bears upon the latter. The existing circumstances of these pastoralist communities can be spatially located against the varied effects imposed upon their ability to practice transhumance. It is in this context that the article analyses the state education policy on securing the futures of the children of the Bakarwal community. The paper highlights the issue of hegemonic bias in state policy on education, which invisibilises the lived environment where the tribe is situated. The paper lays out the effect of formal education on embedded ecologies and epistemes within the community.

Read their full article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2026.2678962

This article was collectively written by CASAS’ members Sinem Kavak, Lorenza Arango, Doi Ra, Zeynep Ceren Eren Benlisoy, CarloJohn Arceo, George T. Mudimu, Daren Shi-chi Leung, Adwoa Yeboah Gyapong and Mnqobi Ngubane.

Abstract:

Migrant workers have long played a central role in the global food system, yet they often remain marginal in food sovereignty discourse and practice. In this paper, we discuss why and how migrant labour is overlooked and explore ways to more effectively integrate migrant workers into food sovereignty frameworks, including debates, discourse, mobilisations, and practices. Increasing numbers of ‘working people’ migrate in search of livelihoods, which raises questions about the role of migrant labour in food sovereignty, its connections to changing forms of social reproduction across different spaces, and its relevance for advancing agrarian justice in the present neoliberal era. Evidence suggests that migrant workers produce food for both self-consumption and market sale in urban, peri-urban, and rural areas. However, the emphasis on localisation within food sovereignty has often prioritized peasant agriculture, overlooking contemporary trends towards semi-proletarianisation within both small peasant and worker households that combine subsistence farming with wage labour. A more inclusive food sovereignty agenda must address the lived realities of working people, particularly regarding their access to land. Urban and peri-urban food production by low-paid and informal workers illustrates the need to expand the concept of food sovereignty beyond rural peasants to encompass diverse labouring populations.

You can cite the article like this:

Kavak, S., Arango, L., Ra, D., Eren Benlisoy, Z. C., Arceo, C. J., Mudimu, G. T., … Ngubane, M. (2026). Food sovereignty, capitalism and migrant workers. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2026.2692534

You can read their full article here: https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2026.2692534

Abstract:

This study examines critically the intersection of agroecology, indigenous knowledge, and cultural practices in Chimani-mani, Zimbabwe, highlighting how sustainable farming is deeply embedded in local social and spiritual life. Through interviews, focus groups, and field observations, we document how communities are reviving traditional foods, seeds, and farming methods as a response to climate change and the limitations of conventional agriculture. Indigenous grains such as finger and pearl millet, alongside legumes and open-pollinated maize varieties, are central not only to nutrition but also to cultural rituals, including food preparation, beer brewing, and rain-making ceremonies. Agroecological prac-tices are reinforced by social institutions such as humwe (labour pooling), seed and food sharing, and the king’s granary (zunde ramambo), fostering community cohesion, intergenerational knowledge transfer, and environmental stewardship. Traditional leaders also play a critical role as custodians of land, culture, and ancestral knowledge, mediating between spiritual and ecological systems. Without romanticising the principles and practices of agroecology, the study highlights how agroecology in Chimanimani is not merely an ecological strategy but a culturally grounded approach that revitalises indigenous knowledge, affirms identity, and strengthens resilience. By situating farming practices within local cosmologies and ethics, agroecology emerges as a possible mechanism for decolonial knowledge reclamation, social solidarity, and climate adaptation in African rural contexts.

Read their full article in: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-026-10916-3

Abstract:

In Egypt, the word “industry” emerged in the 1860s transliterated as al-industriyya (from the French industrie). Rifāʿa al-Ṭahṭāwī, a prominent educator, translator, and man of letters from the 1830s through the 1860s, coined the term and equated it to “public wealth,” “industriousness,” “growth,” and “manufacturing”—among other meanings—and noted that “colonial industry” meant “global trade.” With evidence that the French source—industrie—comes from the Saint-Simonian deliberations on the term, the article traces the lineages of al-industriyya and associated words, as they occurred in al-Ṭahṭāwī’s economic treatise Manāhij (1869), to the Saint-Simonian circle of Prosper Enfantin (1796–1864). The Saint-Simonians had stayed in Egypt in the 1830s, pushed for grand public works projects, and helped establish modern Egyptian engineering education. This transcultural conceptual history shows that advocating and planning colonization, as well as credit and property rights, followed from the rise of processes associated with both concepts (industrie and al-industriyya) as they were presented by the Saint-Simonians and al-Ṭahṭāwī.

Read their full paper here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/56/article/990851

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:

Shifting cultivation is often stigmatized as destructive, blamed for deforestation, and as a contributor to climate change. Many remote sensing studies have attempted to map its extent and estimate its role in deforestation, but misunderstandings about the practice and methodological flaws in mapping have led to misleading conclusions and misguided policies. A recent highly cited paper found shifting cultivation to be a major driver of global forest loss. We not only critique these estimations, highlighting conceptual and empirical flaws, but also showcase how they proliferate in citing literature. We propose a conceptual framework that corrects these flaws by distinguishing the various land covers found within a shifting cultivation landscape and forcing attention to the dynamics therein. We urge scientists to refine mapping methodologies and develop spatiotemporal data tailored to such dynamic landscapes. Mischaracterizing shifting cultivation risks unjustly blaming a system that supports millions of marginalized communities in the Global South.

You can read their paper here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2026.101706