Please note this event will take place online via Zoom. Attendees will need to have a Zoom account to access the webinar, a free Zoom account can be set up at registration.
Speaker: Nozomi Kawarazuka, Social and Nutritional Sciences Division, International Potato Center, CGIAR
Capitalist global agri-food systems are increasingly facing socio-ecological challenges such as the exploitation of labour and natural resources and the production and perpetuation of inequality at multiple levels.
Feminist scholars point out that capitalism’s socio-ecological challenges are driven by ideologies, practices and research frameworks that devalue women’s roles in non-economic activities in the household such as childcare, food provisioning and wellbeing. Similarly, natural resources play significant roles in sustaining economic activities, but they are often neglected in accounts of how capitalist systems work. This allows (food) production systems to exploit women’s unpaid labour and natural resources/energy.
In this webinar, Nozomi will introduce recent feminist political economy approaches which look at interdependent relationships among economic activities, non-economic socially valuable activities, and natural resources. She will draw on recent research on women agribusiness entrepreneurs in Vietnam and Myanmar to demonstrate how food systems are maintained by women’s unpaid labour and intergenerational reciprocal support, their own risk-taking and the changing nature of natural resources. The discussion will provide the opportunity to discuss the potential contribution of feminist political economy approaches to strengthening interdisciplinary research to bring about systemic change towards more equitable and sustainable food systems.
Nozomi is a social scientist at the International Potato Center, part of the international research organisation CGIAR, based in Hanoi, Vietnam. Having gained a BSc in International Nutrition, she worked for an NGO in the Lake Victoria region of Kenya, where fishing communities were involved in a vicious circle of poverty, HIV/AIDS and food insecurity in which gender inequality played a hidden but central role in exacerbating the vicious circle. Here Nozomi became more interested in the underlying social factors of poverty and environmental problems. She subsequently took an MA in Development Studies, returning to Kenya for her Ph.D. ethnographic fieldwork, exploring gender relations and their roles in sustaining informal and illegal fishing in coastal Kenya. Thereafter, she shifted her geographical focus to Southeast Asia. Her current research interests include understanding the mechanism of marginalization and exclusion in informal food systems and challenging male-oriented agricultural technologies. She has a Ph.D. from the University of East Anglia, Norwich.
The talk will be followed by an online Q&A session. Please note the earlier start time of 4pm - 5pm (GMT).
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