Protest in the Fields: Agricultural Workers and Rural Organizing in a Global Context

Catalog description

The agricultural industry accounts for an enormous share of the global political economy, employing 1 billion people and representing 1 in 3 of all workers. Nonetheless, the organization of agricultural workers is often dismissed as too difficult, given the precarity, isolation, citizenship status, and technological displacement of these workers. This course provides a broad exploration of these global and national shifts in food production, tracing the transformations in the agricultural sector and the labor conditions of agricultural workers in the United States and across Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. It considers how agricultural workers have developed new and innovative organizing strategies to demand economic and political rights. Drawing on diverse examples from the United Farm Workers to the global farmers' organization La Via Campesina (the Peasant Way), we will discuss the struggles for rural unions, environmental rights, land access, and food sovereignty. The goal of the course is to provide students with an overview of how the agricultural sector reproduces racial, economic, gender, and national inequities, while also highlighting the potential power that agricultural workers hold to reshape and reconfigure the global economic system. The first half of the course offers an overview of the political and economic history of the agricultural sector, beginning in the eighteenth century and extending to the current day. This part of the course analyzes the shift from small-family farming to industrial agricultural production, as well as particular issues such as women's access to land, the role of international agencies that regulate the agricultural sector, and the rise of organic farming. Building on these insights, students will develop an original thesis and write a paper that explores how these changes in agricultural production unfolded in one particular country The second half of the course analyzes how rural populations have organized for workers' rights within this shifting industry. This section of the course examines a diverse range of rural organizing efforts, from slave revolts to farmer and farmworker movements to transnational attempts to promote food sovereignty.