CASAS’ members Huiying Ng & Dimas D. Laksmana have published this article with Christina Maria Cecilia M. Sayson in “Grassroots. Journal of Political Ecology”.
Abstract: This visual essay offers a closer look at the relations shaping nature’s transformation into a commodity. By tracing reproductive relations of struggle, death, and resurgence, we underscore how commodity production is contested, enabled, or redirected. A struggle to resist the blasting of the Mekong’s rapids succeeds, drawing potency from river spirits known to inhabit the river; sugarcane in Negros grows each year, pumped with fertilizers and the household labor of farmworkers and their families; a permaculture plot seeks to sow an alternative to industrial agriculture, but draws a partial income stream from its peripheral identity in a tourism hub. This essay reflects on built infrastructure, community-based initiatives, sugarcane plantations, and home gardens, illustrating the varied ways in which reproductive relations shape food-growing landscapes in Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Commodity production is constantly contested and transformed. The narrative progresses from struggle to death and, finally, to resurgence.
Read their full article: https://grassrootsjpe.org/seeing-agricultural-life-from-spaces-of-struggle-death-and-resurgence/
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CASAS
The Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists from the Global South (CASAS) is a community of Scholar-Activists working in critical agrarian studies.