Emma Gaalaas Mullaney
My current research examines the intersections of food justice, biological diversity, social difference, and power, in the context of agricultural production and global economic restructuring.
The United Nations has declared 2014 the International Year of Family Farming, and 2011-2020 the Decade on Biodiversity. These declarations recognize the crucial role that genetically-diverse crops and small-scale agriculture play in improving global food security in the face of climate change and economic uncertainty. While working on international policy negotiations through the UNEP (United Nations Environmental Programme) and UN Convention on Biological Diversity, I have witnessed an urgent need for greater scholarly and public understanding of how culture – particularly ideas of gender, race, and indigeneity – structure our food systems and our visions of a possible and desireable agricultural future. Notably absent from most scholarly literature on biodiversity conservation is a direct engagement with the perspectives and lived experiences of smallholder farmers, who are almost entirely responsible for the maintenance of the world’s biodiverse agricultural systems.
As a feminist political ecologist with broad training in ethnography and nature-society relations, I study how diverse groups of humans and non-humans collaborate to produce social and environmental change, with a particular focus on the revanchist dispossession of unruly groups through agricultural modernization. I investigate agricultural biodiversity as an expression of social difference, produced and maintained by generations of attentive human practice, and implicated in the workings of identity and power. It follows that a study of how farmers engage, challenge, and sometimes defy the political, economic, and ecological conditions under which they live must turn to the mundane realities of everyday life, including the daily repetition of discourses and practices in which certain plants and people are valued over others. My research has engaged with the uneven geographies of agricultural development along two major axes: first, around persistent forms of peasant and indigenous production in historically agrarian landscapes; and, second, around emerging forms of urban agriculture as community survival strategies in deindustrializing and globalizing cities.
The United Nations has declared 2014 the International Year of Family Farming, and 2011-2020 the Decade on Biodiversity. These declarations recognize the crucial role that genetically-diverse crops and small-scale agriculture play in improving global food security in the face of climate change and economic uncertainty. While working on international policy negotiations through the UNEP (United Nations Environmental Programme) and UN Convention on Biological Diversity, I have witnessed an urgent need for greater scholarly and public understanding of how culture – particularly ideas of gender, race, and indigeneity – structure our food systems and our visions of a possible and desireable agricultural future. Notably absent from most scholarly literature on biodiversity conservation is a direct engagement with the perspectives and lived experiences of smallholder farmers, who are almost entirely responsible for the maintenance of the world’s biodiverse agricultural systems.
As a feminist political ecologist with broad training in ethnography and nature-society relations, I study how diverse groups of humans and non-humans collaborate to produce social and environmental change, with a particular focus on the revanchist dispossession of unruly groups through agricultural modernization. I investigate agricultural biodiversity as an expression of social difference, produced and maintained by generations of attentive human practice, and implicated in the workings of identity and power. It follows that a study of how farmers engage, challenge, and sometimes defy the political, economic, and ecological conditions under which they live must turn to the mundane realities of everyday life, including the daily repetition of discourses and practices in which certain plants and people are valued over others. My research has engaged with the uneven geographies of agricultural development along two major axes: first, around persistent forms of peasant and indigenous production in historically agrarian landscapes; and, second, around emerging forms of urban agriculture as community survival strategies in deindustrializing and globalizing cities.
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Papers by Emma Gaalaas Mullaney
others have constructed the collective figure of the ‘flash mob’ as a perpetrator of urban terrorism
and the subject of state intervention. We trace the application of this subjectivity to
individual bodies marked by age, race and class, thereby revealing how the latest strategic move in a historic reinforcement of the US ghetto sustains and feeds off of newly heightened and intertwined anxieties about the sources of criminality, violence and terror. If the venal urban geopolitics of Philadelphia reproduces long-standing spatial segregation and social inequality, it does so by exploiting newly emerged nationalist identities and under the auspices of antiterrorist legislation. More broadly, then, this paper argues for closer attention to the social warrant of racialized space and of banal terrorism in the constitution of state power.
academic to explore the precarious yet powerful position of the graduate student in the politics of knowledge production. Our institutions may continue to generate profits and power from our devaluation, but through
groups of solidarity and support we perform a protest, a collective
counterpolitic. Feminist ways of knowing and being lend political leverage
to our efforts to empower our students, protect and challenge each other, and radically reimagine our inherited forms of oppression. The following are brief glimpses into my lived experience of Women’s Studies.
CFPs by Emma Gaalaas Mullaney
Geographies of State Terror
After forty-three students were disappeared one year ago from the streets of Iguala, Guerrero, Mexican citizens took to the streets by the hundreds of thousand, crying “Fue el Estado” – It was the State. This cry of grief and rage resonates with a complex global geography of violence that is sanctioned, designed, and administered by apparatuses of state power. In convening a session on Geographies of State Terror, we seek to better understand where and why the state terrorizes people.
State terrorism is nothing new. However, several twenty-first century political and economic shifts have altered these old forms of violence in pernicious and important ways. First, since September 11, 2001, the state has developed new technologies and claimed new license to surveille, apprehend, and even assassinate. Expansive new definitions of criminals and enemy combatants have authorized preemptive action against targeted likely threats, profiled by race, gender, religion, and nationality. Second, amidst the wreckage of the post-2008 financial crisis, renewed neoliberal and austerity policies have served to further consolidate wealth and accelerate the dispossession of the global poor. Third, these growing, discontented populations of surplus humanity are a source of increasing anxiety among the political and economic elite. This shifting terrain – in which state apparatuses seek to produce and punish terrorized subjects – demands innovative scholarship and solidarities.
We seek, through this session, to bring these three trends into conversation with one another toward a deeper, clearer understanding of how state terrorism operates and what it accomplishes.
Topics for proposed papers could include, but are not limited to:
Militarized and anticipatory policing
State-sanctioned extra-legal and paramilitary violence
Mass incarceration and detention
Border security and deportations
Racist and trans/homophobic profiling
“counter-terrorist” strikes
Institutions of impunity
Vagabond capitalism and social reproduction
Terror in the spaces of everyday life
Race and the Agrarian Question
Organizers: Levi Van Sant (University of Georgia) and Emma Gaalaas Mullaney (Bucknell University)
Discussants: Julie Guthman (US-Santa Cruz) and Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern (Syracuse)
Kautsky's classic formulation of the Agrarian Question remains relevant today, as it is continually reframed and re-examined in new historical and geographical conjunctures. It has, for instance, been the inspiration behind much of the recent scholarship on land grabs and "the new agrarian studies" more broadly. At its most basic, the Agrarian Question seeks to understand the role of agriculture - as opposed to other forms of (re)production - in the development of capitalism.
Though The Agrarian Question is as germinal to the 21st century as when it was first published in 1899, we want to take this opportunity to grapple with the fundamental racism of capitalism, and to thus renew the Agrarian Question in the context of intersectional racial politics. Doing so suggests a series of questions to guide our efforts: How does racialization articulate with shifting regimes of land tenure and agricultural production? Which approaches to the Agrarian Question might illuminate new possibilities for anti-racist politics (and farming)? What is the specific role of capitalist agriculture in the reproduction of racial inequality?
We welcome papers that approach these questions from a broad range of positions. Topics might include, but are by no means limited to:
• The racial politics of land grabs
• Agricultural science as racial knowledge
• Whiteness and agrarian identity
• Reparations and racial justice
• Agriculture and postcolonial/neo-imperial geopolitics
• Dispossession as a racial project
• Exclusionary rural development and agricultural extension
• Farming as anti-racist praxis
• Indigenous/aboriginal/diasporic/peasant agrarian knowledges and practices
If there is sufficient participation we are interested in using these sessions to propose a journal special issue. With that in mind please be specific as to how your paper will engage both racial politics and the agrarian question, and send proposed abstracts of up to 250 words and a short CV by October 10th to: Levi Van Sant ([email protected]) Emma Gaalaas Mullaney ([email protected]). We will confirm participation by October 17th, with abstracts and AAG registration due on October 29th.
Conference Presentations by Emma Gaalaas Mullaney
Emma Gaalaas Mullaney studies the importance of indigenous knowledge as a resource for agrobiodiversity conservation and for farmer innovation, not only in terms of selective crop breeding, but also in terms of imaginative reworkings of local and regional market systems. Drawing on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico’s Central Highland region, her presentation will explore Nahuatl conceptions of maize, which is understood as an original source of human life, and also vernacular expressions of desmadre, a Mexican slang for “chaos” and “disorder” that is coded as feminine. These ideas play an influential role in the everyday work of peasant maize farmers in the region, illuminate new possibilities for a more just agricultural future, and also pose unexpected challenges to decades of agricultural modernization efforts.
By highlighting the importance of indigenous ways of knowing to agricultural livelihoods and biodiversity conservation, this research takes important steps toward the realization of development policy that effectively serves the needs of farmers in a region where maize cultivation is a source of food security, livelihood, cultural identity, and biodiversity.
others have constructed the collective figure of the ‘flash mob’ as a perpetrator of urban terrorism
and the subject of state intervention. We trace the application of this subjectivity to
individual bodies marked by age, race and class, thereby revealing how the latest strategic move in a historic reinforcement of the US ghetto sustains and feeds off of newly heightened and intertwined anxieties about the sources of criminality, violence and terror. If the venal urban geopolitics of Philadelphia reproduces long-standing spatial segregation and social inequality, it does so by exploiting newly emerged nationalist identities and under the auspices of antiterrorist legislation. More broadly, then, this paper argues for closer attention to the social warrant of racialized space and of banal terrorism in the constitution of state power.
academic to explore the precarious yet powerful position of the graduate student in the politics of knowledge production. Our institutions may continue to generate profits and power from our devaluation, but through
groups of solidarity and support we perform a protest, a collective
counterpolitic. Feminist ways of knowing and being lend political leverage
to our efforts to empower our students, protect and challenge each other, and radically reimagine our inherited forms of oppression. The following are brief glimpses into my lived experience of Women’s Studies.
Geographies of State Terror
After forty-three students were disappeared one year ago from the streets of Iguala, Guerrero, Mexican citizens took to the streets by the hundreds of thousand, crying “Fue el Estado” – It was the State. This cry of grief and rage resonates with a complex global geography of violence that is sanctioned, designed, and administered by apparatuses of state power. In convening a session on Geographies of State Terror, we seek to better understand where and why the state terrorizes people.
State terrorism is nothing new. However, several twenty-first century political and economic shifts have altered these old forms of violence in pernicious and important ways. First, since September 11, 2001, the state has developed new technologies and claimed new license to surveille, apprehend, and even assassinate. Expansive new definitions of criminals and enemy combatants have authorized preemptive action against targeted likely threats, profiled by race, gender, religion, and nationality. Second, amidst the wreckage of the post-2008 financial crisis, renewed neoliberal and austerity policies have served to further consolidate wealth and accelerate the dispossession of the global poor. Third, these growing, discontented populations of surplus humanity are a source of increasing anxiety among the political and economic elite. This shifting terrain – in which state apparatuses seek to produce and punish terrorized subjects – demands innovative scholarship and solidarities.
We seek, through this session, to bring these three trends into conversation with one another toward a deeper, clearer understanding of how state terrorism operates and what it accomplishes.
Topics for proposed papers could include, but are not limited to:
Militarized and anticipatory policing
State-sanctioned extra-legal and paramilitary violence
Mass incarceration and detention
Border security and deportations
Racist and trans/homophobic profiling
“counter-terrorist” strikes
Institutions of impunity
Vagabond capitalism and social reproduction
Terror in the spaces of everyday life
Race and the Agrarian Question
Organizers: Levi Van Sant (University of Georgia) and Emma Gaalaas Mullaney (Bucknell University)
Discussants: Julie Guthman (US-Santa Cruz) and Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern (Syracuse)
Kautsky's classic formulation of the Agrarian Question remains relevant today, as it is continually reframed and re-examined in new historical and geographical conjunctures. It has, for instance, been the inspiration behind much of the recent scholarship on land grabs and "the new agrarian studies" more broadly. At its most basic, the Agrarian Question seeks to understand the role of agriculture - as opposed to other forms of (re)production - in the development of capitalism.
Though The Agrarian Question is as germinal to the 21st century as when it was first published in 1899, we want to take this opportunity to grapple with the fundamental racism of capitalism, and to thus renew the Agrarian Question in the context of intersectional racial politics. Doing so suggests a series of questions to guide our efforts: How does racialization articulate with shifting regimes of land tenure and agricultural production? Which approaches to the Agrarian Question might illuminate new possibilities for anti-racist politics (and farming)? What is the specific role of capitalist agriculture in the reproduction of racial inequality?
We welcome papers that approach these questions from a broad range of positions. Topics might include, but are by no means limited to:
• The racial politics of land grabs
• Agricultural science as racial knowledge
• Whiteness and agrarian identity
• Reparations and racial justice
• Agriculture and postcolonial/neo-imperial geopolitics
• Dispossession as a racial project
• Exclusionary rural development and agricultural extension
• Farming as anti-racist praxis
• Indigenous/aboriginal/diasporic/peasant agrarian knowledges and practices
If there is sufficient participation we are interested in using these sessions to propose a journal special issue. With that in mind please be specific as to how your paper will engage both racial politics and the agrarian question, and send proposed abstracts of up to 250 words and a short CV by October 10th to: Levi Van Sant ([email protected]) Emma Gaalaas Mullaney ([email protected]). We will confirm participation by October 17th, with abstracts and AAG registration due on October 29th.
Emma Gaalaas Mullaney studies the importance of indigenous knowledge as a resource for agrobiodiversity conservation and for farmer innovation, not only in terms of selective crop breeding, but also in terms of imaginative reworkings of local and regional market systems. Drawing on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico’s Central Highland region, her presentation will explore Nahuatl conceptions of maize, which is understood as an original source of human life, and also vernacular expressions of desmadre, a Mexican slang for “chaos” and “disorder” that is coded as feminine. These ideas play an influential role in the everyday work of peasant maize farmers in the region, illuminate new possibilities for a more just agricultural future, and also pose unexpected challenges to decades of agricultural modernization efforts.
By highlighting the importance of indigenous ways of knowing to agricultural livelihoods and biodiversity conservation, this research takes important steps toward the realization of development policy that effectively serves the needs of farmers in a region where maize cultivation is a source of food security, livelihood, cultural identity, and biodiversity.