About Us


Although the literature on globalization generally focuses on high-modernist industrial capitalism, assuming a "flat" world (Friedman 2005) disembodied and divorced from its physical surroundings through space-time compression, contemporary development turns in fundamental ways on the incorporation -- and transformation -- of our most basic natural resource, the land. Land is sustenance, territory, culture, ecosystem, possession, power, and profit. It is social and cultural location in a time characterized rhetorically by rapid flows of information, capital, people, and ideas. And although it has always been such, the nature of our relationship to the land has been profoundly affected by development(s) of the past fifty years.

Throughout this year-long seminar, titled "The Changing Nature(s) of Land: Property, Peasants and Agricultural Production in a Global World," we will examine our relationship with land through four central, multidisciplinary themes. The themes include the widespread transformations in property rights, the emergence of agrarian workers as a political force, the ecological impacts of globalization and economic development, and finally, the intimate nature of food production and consumption from the standpoint of the body to the transnational.

Wendy Wolford (seminar chair)
Department of Geography, UNC Chapel Hill

Meenu Tewari (seminar co-chair)
Department of City and Regional Planning, UNC Chapel Hill