Logistics


1) The layout of the seminar:
The year-long seminar will be divided into two different types of meetings: regular bi-weekly working group meetings broken up by four intensive two-day workshops. These two different formats will be organized around the four primary seminar themes, allowing for broad coverage of each topic and intensive development of key ideas. Each of the themes will be led by a key faculty member and will last approximately two and a half months.

For the regular working group meetings, papers will be distributed electronically at least one week prior to the meeting. They will also be available in hard copy at UCIS, the University Center for International Studies. Papers for each meeting will include background reading and one work-in-progress written by a seminar participant. The meetings will be opened by a discussant who will present a prepared set of comments, after which general questions and comments will be addressed to the author. The author will have a chance to respond after at least one half hour has passed.

The intensive two-day workshops will cap the working group meetings on each theme. Speakers will include outside invited guests as well as internal seminar participants. Speakers will give public presentations and address issues raised by seminar participants during the working group meetings.

2) Participation:
We encourage people from different theoretical traditions and empirical experience to present and develop hypotheses and evidence concerning the position of peasants, property and agricultural production within contemporary globalization. For each of the two-day workshops discussed in more detail in the body of this proposal, outside speakers have been listed who may be invited to attend. These speakers have been selected for their comparative coverage of the key themes. Both the principal investigator and co-principal investigator have widespread contacts in the fields, which will be helpful in coordinating the seminar.

3) Intended goals:
The primary goal of this seminar is to foster discussion around a theme relevant to a variety of professionals and scholars working in the social sciences, humanities, and professional schools across campus. The nature of the theme is such that it defies narrow analyses, and a collective conversation will be extremely productive.
A secondary goal of this seminar will be to produce an edited volume addressing the four themes described below. The edited volume will compile papers presented throughout the year during both the working group meetings and the two-day intensive workshops. Both resources will help to tie together the overarching topic of land transformations as understood and studied from a variety of theoretical and empirical perspectives.