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My work rests at the intersection
of political ecology, political economy, and feminist
theory. My present project, 'Certified Lives', examines
transnational certification practices in the context
of certified-organic and fair-trade coffee. I Trace
relations of power and transparency through transnational
networks, and argue that that what passes for transparency
in international certification circles appears rather
opaque when viewed from a coffee producer standpoint.
Within the context of international solidarity and (neoliberal)
institutional transformations, opacity results in part,
I suggest, from a deployment of ISO (International Organization
for Standardization) rubrics. My ‘Political Economy
of Transnational Certification: Signs, Labels &
Rents’ project examines what Lukás called
‘fetish capitalism’, that is to say, the
particular ways in which the operation of even ‘ethical’
markets are necessarily marked by rent-seeking, cost
squeezes, and other dynamics. My ‘certified lives’
research project, however, is ethnographic, carried
out in villages and producer organizations in Oaxaca,
Mexico. I am most interested in the ways in which these
network dynamics are felt and lived in producer families,
how the changing ecological and economic landscape is
woven into everyday lives, affecting gender relations
and shaping grassroots action to challenge exploitative
relations and assert a proactive social agency. Drawing
on ecological work in matrix ecology and institutional
ethnographies, I ask how farmers can participate in
regional conservation and protect local ecologies. The
goal will be to how theories of matrix ecology, terroir
(geographical food territories), social networks, and
commodity analysis may be woven together into a ‘conservation
networks’ theory.
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