Suchergebnisse

Alternative food narratives imply an ethical relationship to food production and consumption practices. Organic food and agriculture are known as ethical alternatives since they use methods which counter dominant food systems and markets dependent on industrial agriculture and chemical inputs. The organic movement itself, although global, is locally articulated and relationally situated in ecologies, cultures and politics. However, 'Organic' is also a global brand, with global ambitions. This paper aims to tease out the discrepancies between global ethical discourse and situated ethical practice by bringing together existing ethnographic insights from women's organic agricultural collectives in South India with a discourse analysis of the joint annual reports by FiBL (Research Institute of Organic Agriculture, Switzerland) and The International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements (IFOAM - Organics International). In problematising the inner workings of the narratives found in these reports, the paper unpacks their colonial continuities, demonstrating the biopolitical regimes of representation they help reproduce. The practice of organic collective agriculture in South India, I argue, represents an 'alterbiopolitics' which questions the universalist assumptions of IFOAM - Organics International's 'growing organic world'. (Asien/GIGA)

This paper explores ethical issues of reciprocity, reflexivity and situatedness in conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the Global South as part of PhD research projects. Against the backdrop of increasingly bureaucratised doctoral processes, we argue that PhD students occupy a particular terrain that involves continuous navigation of tensions between institutionally-required ethical procedures and 'situational' ethical processes in the field. We illustrate these tensions by analysing reflections on our experiences of conducting fieldwork in Indonesia, India and the Philippines. Guided by decolonial and feminist thought highlighting the politics of knowledge (co)production, this paper unpacks the problems of insider-outsider binaries and standardised ethical procedures, and explores the possibilities of ethics as visible, collaborative negotiation.

This paper explores ethical issues of reciprocity, reflexivity and situatedness in conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the Global South as part of PhD research projects. Against the backdrop of increasingly bureaucratised doctoral processes, we argue that PhD students occupy a particular terrain that involves continuous navigation of tensions between institutionally-required ethical procedures and 'situational' ethical processes in the field. We illustrate these tensions by analysing reflections on our experiences of conducting fieldwork in Indonesia, India and the Philippines. Guided by decolonial and feminist thought highlighting the politics of knowledge (co)production, this paper unpacks the problems of insider-outsider binaries and standardised ethical procedures, and explores the possibilities of ethics as visible, collaborative negotiation.

Renaming the chair of "Comparative development and Cultural studies with a focus on Southeast Asia" to "Critical Development Studies—Southeast Asia" is the outcome of an intense intellectual, political and yet intimate process over the last three years. In autumn 2019 a group of international students from the MA Development Studies program reported the shock of experiencing racism in study groups and when looking for shared housing. While confined to online teaching, during class one student found the courage to share their experience of a racist incident on public transport in Passau, the perpetrator humiliating him before vanishing into anonymity.These distressing and painful aggressions urged us to start reflecting on our responsibilities and capabilities, as a chair at the university, to act upon discrimination and racism which still permeate higher education, and the field we teach - development practice. During regular research labs over the last year, we read and discussed texts and debates from critical theory and perspectives from fields such as feminist political ecology (FPE), post-development, decolonial theory and new area studies. This process of learning, unlearning and relearning built up to this minifesto. Following Kallis (2018), we call this a minifesto because unlike a manifesto, which would present our grand theory or idea, we present here a collection of small but significant ideas. We believe these ideas and the commitment to pluralism will help shape the teaching practice and learning environment at the chair.