Which way transdisciplinarity? Elite capture or rural autonomy? - Dr. Rob Wallace, Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps
11th DRAC Presentation on Dec 2nd 2022 at 12 PM
Abstract:
From the Portuguese's first incursions into the Madeira islands in 1419 on, science has served colonialist powers and a series of capitalist formations in decoding--and then recoding--newly encountered lands and peoples into commodity production. Science has also served a parallel history of community practitioners who, hood to holler, have conducted research solving everyday problematics or explicitly serving the people--from the Owenite Halls of Science to the People's CDC today. But every new idea, even those aimed at liberating put-upon constituencies, can be appropriated by elite institutions charged with operationalizing the next generation in expropriation. We review two recent examples trying something else. The two aim at a bottom-up transdisciplinarity for restoring rural autonomy (rather than preserving the relations of production causing much of the present social and ecological damage). One farmer-initiated research project seeks to help turn what it learns from interviewing farmers into community-led regional agricultures. A second effort folds together disease modeling, control theory, and military theory to plot out strategies in asymmetric conflict by which farmers can defeat corporate agribusiness.
Biography of Speaker:
Rob Wallace is an evolutionary epidemiologist at the Agroecology and Rural Economics Research Corps. He is author of Big Farms Make Big Flu and the forthcoming The Fault in Our SARS: COVID-19 in the Biden Era. He has coauthored a number of technical volumes, including Neoliberal Ebola: Modeling Disease Emergence from Finance to Forest and Farm and Clear-Cutting Disease Control: Capital-Led Deforestation, Public Health Austerity, and Vector-Borne Infection. He has consulted for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN.