Embodiment and Land Loss: Gender, Disability, Age
‘Land-grabbing’ is increasingly gaining headlines across Africa, as global and local processes of financialisation, resource extraction, and expanding value chains place increasing pressure on land as a ‘resource.’ While stories of dispossession abound, most focus on spectacular, community-level stories of eviction, and there is still limited knowledge about how land exclusion occurs within families and communities (Vicol et al. 2022: 8). In this panel, we bring discussion of embodied social identities – gender, disability, and age among them – into discussion with land loss, asking how bodies and embodiment are implicated in access to land. We consider the micro-level interactions that lead to everyday forms of exclusion, but also how patterns of land loss among gendered, disabled, and aged people relate to large scale technologies such as systems of land tenure, agricultural and financial technologies, and international linkages. As pressure on systems of access to land increases, how do ideologies and practices of embodied difference mark out the winners and losers?
By email to Julia Modern at jm121@soas.ac.uk by Thursday 30th March 2023.
We are also open to edits to our panel proposal, so feel free to request changes if they will make the call more relevant for your work.
