Anthropology Seminar Series:

Australia’s New Peasantry: Towards a Politics and Practice of Custodianship on Agroecological Farms

Join via Zoom: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/84573121784

Speakers: Tammi Jonas and Catie Gressier

Since settlement, colonial values of productivity and improvement have driven the transformation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Country into a site of agricultural extraction. In recent decades, these values have coalesced into market logic, with industrial deregulation and pro-competitive reforms enabling agribusiness to thrive at the expense of rural communities, animal welfare and the environment. Disillusionment with the ecological and social damage wrought by this trajectory has seen the emergence of parallel movements towards regenerative agriculture and agroecology – the former imbued with the entrepreneurial logic of capitalism, and the latter a more nascent turn among smallholders towards the logic of a new peasantry. Drawing on case studies from three farms on the unceded lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung, Jinibara, and Ngambri, Wallabaloa and Pajong peoples respectively, we explore how new peasants are critically engaged in the development of a politics and practice of custodianship in collaboration with local Indigenous community members, and the global peasant movement, in pursuit of an agroecological transition.

Speakers:

Tammi Jonas (University of Western Australia)

Tammi Jonas is an agroecologist in principle and in practice. Along with her husband Stuart, she raises heritage-breed Large Black pastured pigs, cattle, and garlic on the unceded lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung in the central highlands of Victoria, striving to care for country with grace, and with respect for the Djaara and their elders past and present. Tammi has been president of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA) since 2014. AFSA has worked for more than a decade as a collective of individuals and organisations to promote everyone’s right to nutritious and culturally-appropriate food produced and distributed in ethical and ecologically-sound ways, and our right to democratically determine our own food and agriculture systems. She is an editor and co-author of Farming Democracy: Radically transforming the food system from the ground up (2019). Tammi is also undertaking a PhD at the University of Western Australia on the biodiverse and decolonising practices of agroecological farmers, and the technical, social, and legislative enabling conditions for an agroecological transition in Australia.

Catie Gressier (Australian National University)

Catie Gressier is an Australian Research Council (DECRA) Fellow in the Anthropology and Sociology discipline group at the University of Western Australia. With a current focus on rare and heritage breed livestock farming and conservation, her research has explored interspecies relations, foodways, health and illness, and settler identities in Australia and Botswana. She is a Director of the Rare Breeds Trust of Australia, an Editorial Board Member of Anthropological Forum, and the coordinator of the Ecology, People, Place (EcoPeoPle) research network.

Host: Sophie Chao

Join via Zoom: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/84573121784