THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Introduction
This research will center on the representations of gender inside food
security policies, how they change while travelling between different
scales of policymaking. This means addressing literature from the
nascent field of feminist food studies and centering on the over-specified
term of food security. Food security has been dubbed a problem of
[economic]
development,
a
gendered
problem,
an
ecological/environmental problem, among others. Having been in use in
intergovernmental policy contexts since the 1970s, definitions of food
security abound. Similarly, feminisms gained prominence in international
governance organizations and policymaking during the same period,
resulting in different interactions between these two domains. The
attention given to these interactions between gender and food scholars
has been meagre, providing fertile grounds for further inspection.
A. Feminist Food Studies
In 2006 Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Harber called for the
consolidation of a scholarly field called feminist food studies. This is at
the crossroads of two interdisciplinary fields, Gender and Womens
Studies and Food Studies. According to their diagnostic few scholars in
food studies brought a gendered or feminist perspective to their work on
food, and feminist scholars focused only on womens food pathologies
(Avakian and Harber 2006:2). These authors attempt a classification that
shows how during the 1990s both fields converged, indicating how
knowledge has been gained from this interdisciplinary junction. Allen and
Sachs (2007) try a similar endeavor, attempting a more systematic
classification and indicating three research domains that can be said to
ascribe to feminist food studies: the corporeal, the socio-cultural, and the
material. I will describe each of them arguing how they are generating
conversations to which my research proposal wishes to speak to.
Embodied politics
The first domain references embodied politics. As posited by J. K. GibsonGraham, the body is an overdetermined social location in which a
multitude of social, political, physiological, and discursive practices
participate in constituting the act of starvation (1996, 96). One such
discursive practice is public policy. As Lucy Jarosz has argued, hunger is
often used interchangeably with Food security in intergovernmental
policy platforms (2011:117). However, most of the literature in this
domain doesnt pay much attention to the construction of a bodily
discourse through public policy. Instead, it usually traces how the
political economy of food commodification transforms gendered bodies
differently. For example, Susan Bordo (1990/1998) examines eating
disorders through a foucauldian discourse analysis that allows her to

identify 'technologies of body management': the intersection of

discourses of femininity, mind-body dualism, and femininity produce an
array of phenomena such as dieting and eating disorders that transform
womens bodies in particular into docile bodies. Kathy Davis (1991) has
a less grim view, focusing on how women seek to change their bodies to
empower themselves against institutional structures that are more
difficult to change individually, dealing with subjective encounters that
define a persons boundaries of ab/normality, d/efficiency, and in/justice.
In sum, it can be said that this domain draws attention to how the
agrifood system has consequences on the human body through gendered
difference.
This lack in the literature is stressed by Gibson-Graham (1996:97):
Given the centrality of the economy to modernist social
representations it is necessary to defamiliarize the economy as
feminists have denaturalized the body, as one step toward generating
alternative social conceptions and allowing new political subjectivities to
be born. In as much as food security is deemed an economic problem,
the authors post-development stance can be assimilated. It is significant
to follow suit from feminists scholarship on the politics of the
disordered/ing individual body, and apply it to the social/economic body,
allowing its reimagination/denaturalization for new political subjectivities
to emerge.
Susan Buck-Morss makes a similar call, advocating for research that
offers a critical vision of the social body that, as a result of economic
interdependence, offers (new) political alternatives. She sheds some light
on how to do this. One example interesting for this research proposal,
Buck-Morss detects a paradox in the logic behind the idea of the laboring
man described in Adam Smiths The Wealth of Nations, one of the
founding texts of contemporary economics; that each real body is
stunted in order for the social body to prosper (1995:448). Albeit
speaking metaphorically, the desiring contradictions of the dichotomous
model of the economic subject that she diagnoses as schizophrenic 1, the
measurement of the growth/prosperity of the individual and social bodies
has been the concern of interdisciplinary research, sometimes referred to
1 Explicitly, Buck-Morss puts defends the thesis that self-discipline is required of
the producer, and insatiable desire is required of the consumer; but since they
are the same person the construction of the economic subject is nothing short of
schizophrenic (1995:454). This diagnosis was also noted famously by Deleuze
and Guattari in the two volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia. This confluence is
brought forward by J.K. Gibson-Graham (1996). That there is a latent bodily
ontology in the theory of value is explicated by Foucault (1975The order of
things). According to Amariglio there is a predominance of bodily desire in
Marxism while Neoclassical economics emphasizes its labouring aspects
(1988:585). Buck-Morss seems to find a more complex depiction, both desiring
and labouring, in Adam Smiths writings.

as auxology. The stunting of bodies while augmenting wealth has

occurred, revealing nutrition-laden class inequalities, although it has
been positively correlated during most of the 20 th century (Fogel
2004:34ff; Floud et al 2011:34ff). In this way, embodied wealth points to
the structural imbalance where class difference is the by-product of
national wealth and it is class difference that determines ones power in
the marketplace, including the power to bargain effectively for the price
of ones own labor (Buck-Morss 1995:449).
Auxology, an accompanying multidisciplinary, although subsidiary field of
human development, has consolidated around the idea that biophysical
growth and its measures (commonly height and weight) mirror
nutritional status, health and wealth, as well as socioeconomic and
political conditions. Thus, human development literature argues that the
human body can be a measure of development, both economic and
otherwise. For example, Floud et al (2011) present the argument that
development can be embodied, as they deal with the evolution of
anthropometric indicators as explanatory variables of economic success,
or as proxies themselves of wealth gains. From a less critical angle than
those of Buck-Morss or Gibson-Graham, technology-Darwinian arguments
about technophysio evolution are made by this school Fogel and Costa
(1997), Fogel (2004), Baten and Carson (2010), Baltzer and Baten (2007);
Floud et al (2011). The accelerated transformation of the human since
the 18th century (changes in the size, shape, and capabilities of the
human body) is explained by this research as the consequence of
technological change, particularly in food production and distribution, as
well as combating disease.
This literature advances that it is changes in the global food system, and
not individual choice the principal driver of the long term caloric energy
imbalances leading to malnourishment. In particular, nutritional status
tends to reflect conditions on food in/security, and allow to describe
power relations, including gendered differences. The common grounds of
the disciplines invested in this research is the use of energy as a
metaphor allowing for the mechanization of life. More explicitly, they
hold the premise that all living beings convert energy into work: Human
beings, from conception to death, take in energy in the form of food and
warmth and expend it in body maintenance, growth, exercise, and work
both physical and intellectual (Fogel et al 2011:3).
Although this last literature has incorporated some critiques from
feminist economics, measurement of the human body continues to be
substantively male inside the economic-dominated field of development.
For practical reasons or other biases, the teleology of development
imposes men as the measure of the human. That the privileged
productive male body is the measure of all others can be read in the
following passage:
[In] rich countries today, around 1,800 to 2,600 calories of energy
are available for work of an adult male ages 20-39. Note that

calories for females, children, and the aged are converted into
equivalent males aged 20-39, called consuming units, to
standardize the age and sex distributions of each population. This
means that if females aged 15-19 consume on average 0.78 of the
calories consumed on average by males aged 20-39, they are
considered 0.78 of a male aged 20-39, insofar as caloric
consumption is concerned, or 78 percent of a consuming unit
(Fogel 2004:10-11)
This point is made fiercely in the Feminist Critique of Political Economy
made by Gibson-Graham (1996:101ff). They are keen to point out that
this (as any theory about the economy) is a gendered construction:
Man's body, constituted as an organism structured by a life force that
produces order from within, became at this time the modern episteme,
setting unspoken rules of discursive practice that invisibly unified and
constrained the multifarious and divergent discourses of the physical,
life, and social sciences2 (p.101-102).
Another critical angle to this discourse comes from the intersection of
science and technology studies with poststructuralist economics.
Attention is given to the discursive production of the body inside
economic discourse, a project started by Jack Amariglio (1988). This is
the case of Philip Mirowski, who states that natural philosophers created
a system of accounts or evaluation stemming from their economic milieu
(1989:106). Mirowski presents a genealogy of economics and physics by
tracing the concept of energy as a metaphor. This is to say, the discourse
of the body has been constructed in connection to those of physics and
economics since Foucaults classical period. In such a context,
anthropomorphics is a metaphor constructed in relation to those of
motion and value, which have discursively distantiated since the
seventeenth century. Body/motion characterizes symmetry of energy, the
body/value face will prove in many respects the most controversial
aspect, because it is responsible for the less-acknowledged
anthropomorphic and social character of the energy concept, the
religious overtones and the cultural influences so often spurned as the
opposite of scientific argument (Mirowski 1989:108). The body began
then to be imagined as a machine that transforms energy, from food to
work. It is thus important to acknowledge in this research that there are
discursive strategies at play in the production of texts that aim to
manage populations, which relate the body with economics and physics,
food being the common term.

2 They are building on Foucaults idea that the emergence of Man and his body
as the grounds for disciplinary knowledge as stated in The Order of Things.
Amariglio (1988), an economist who made efforts to bring Foucaults analysis
into Economics is cited frequently by Gibson-Graham.

This field of research has been advanced recently shifting the

geographical focus by Latin American scholars (Roldan 2010, McGraw
2007). Stephan Pohl-Valero has pursued this enquiry with an emphasis on
the Colombian context, offering a framework of analysis of the body-as-amachine (both human and social) through the categories of nutrition and
race. This describes a project of social engineering [that] began to take
shape in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when Colombian
doctors, engineers, and lawyers were building a nascent field of
knowledge about work that appropriated and articulated notions of
thermodynamics, medical physics, political economy, and laboratory
physiology (Pohl-Valero 2014:456). The importance of a balanced diet
that would optimize the productive national and individual body is
analyzed by this author through the lens of race. Like in Mirowskis work,
this literature has not employed a gender lens systematically despite its
apparent relevance (Pohl-Valero:460; Mirowski 2002:282; GibsonGraham:101). This lack will be addressed and further developed in the
CEE.
In sum, the domain of embodied politics can be further enriched by the
building on the subdomains described above. As Allen and Sachs (2007)
proposed, this domain inside feminist food studies can expand outside
from body discontent and the production of eating disorders. The present
research proposal seeks to investigate how the above literature about
embodiment can unite into an analysis of the food security discourse
inside contemporary policy texts, including a comparative historical
element. If knowledge about the human and social bodies continuous to
be about ordering and measuring, the production of food security policies
can be studied as an apparatus/dispositif of present day biopolitics. Policy
discourses that speak of how the ideal body is to be constructed and that
evaluates how the present bodies of the populations they seek to govern
are, can and should be studied through a gender lens that unearths
subjacent discriminations that perpetuate inequality.
FOR THE CEE
diet became a field of research and a social intervention articulated in the languagesimultaneously
natural and culturalof the energy-centric physiology of nutrition and through a particular conception of
heredity that, within the field of childcare (or, as I will discuss below, what experts called puericulture),
suggested that the human machines optimization for work was a heritable condition (Pohl-

Valero:460)
began to take shape in the last decades of the nineteenth century, when Colombian doctors, engineers, and
lawyers were building a nascent field of knowledge about work that appropriated and articulated notions of
thermodynamics, medical physics, political economy, and laboratory physiology. At the heart of this research
we find the pursuit of an ideal that sought to optimize workers productivity from an energy-centric point of
view; in it, diet began to be understood primarily as the energy sourcemeasured using the thermodynamic
unit of caloriesneeded for the human machine to work efficiently.

Roldn, Diego P. 2010. Discursos alrededor del cuerpo, la

mquina, la energa y la fatiga: Hibridaciones culturales en la
Argentina fin-de-siecle. Historia, Ciencias, Sade -Manguinhos 17,
no. 3: 643-61.
McGraw, Jason. 2007. Purificar la nacin: Eugenesia, higiene y renovacin moral-racial
de la periferia del Caribe colombiano, 1900-1930. Translated by Marcela
Echeverri. Revista de Estudios Sociales, no. 27: 62-75.

Discerning bodies in economic discourse

The body in modern economic discourse (Amariglio and Ruccio)
Skeptical reflections on flat bodies and heavy metal
Gendered subjectivities in neoclassical economics
The disavowal of the sexed body in neoclassical economic
(HEWITSON

These bodies of literature have the possibility of joining in this

bodily domain of embodied politics inside the field of feminist food
studies critically addressing gender in the construction of bodily
identities inside food policy texts. This research intends to do
precisely this, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
The socio-cultural domain
The socio-cultural domain that Allen and Sachs (2007) identify focuses on
studies that inquire how women are constructed as responsible of food
provisioning inside the household without being equally represented in
food spaces outside domestic labor. Concomitantly, care through
nourishing forges womens subjectivities in their social spaces and
reproduce culture. Anthropology of food pioneered this domain although
geography, and political ecology within it, have cultivated gender
analysis. Uma Narayan (1995) is a notable example, where food is
located across and within cultural spaces, centering her analysis on
colonized-colonizer relations. Narayan shows how the British mission to
civilize India came along a motley attempt to incorporate the IndianOther into the Colonial Self, in a similar fashion as a variety of plates
from Tamil speaking cuisines got grouped into the term curry, later
turned into a British spice from India that no Indian had ever imagined.
She also remarks how gender roles continue to be implicated in the
scripts of their respective nationalisms and cultural identities (1995:72).
Just as for Narayan the influence of the colonies on colonizing powers is
as complicated a matter as the impact of the colonizers on their colonies
(1995:67), this domain will provide a useful conversation to approach the
multilayered ways in which global policies affect the making of local
ones.

Vandana Shiva, a relevant figure of Ecofeminism, has raised her voice

against the ways in which global designs affect ex-colonial communities.
Shiva has advanced a view where women, specially from the third world,
have been traditional food providers, and such a role has been much
valued in sustainable cultures (1988; 2000). Shiva has codified that the
sustainable representation of nature is that of the mother (2000:50ff), as
against the patriarchal view of development rhetoric that negates
natures capacity of regeneration and engendering (bio)diversity
(1988:1ff).
The criticisms against this essentialist vision of women and the
environment is summarized by Nightingale (2006:4ff). Shivas
assumption that women are closer to nature and strive for its protection,
although important to spur a global womens environmental movement,
ignored very real differences that exist between women and worse, rely
on the notion of an essential female nature (Nightingale 2006:5).
Women are depicted as an almost homogenous lot, sharing the sympathy
and understanding of environmental change. However, the environmental
knowledge of rural women was esteemed critical and decisive. Culturallyspecific gender roles, the same as the practices of men and women in
relation to their agro-environment, became relevant for political
economic analysis.
In Bioparacy Shiva seems to incorporate some of the criticisms, while
arguing that there is a capitalistic logic at play that labels matter as
nature that enables the expropriation of resources from those who
would otherwise claim it theirs. Sustainable communities, and women in
particular, are usually guardians of biodiversity, medicinal knowledge and
practices, seeds, and genes, which are now being patented by institutions
for commercial use and away from those who could otherwise claim them
as their own: indigenous communities, patients, countries, etc. Biopiracy
is thus a natural right of Western corporations, necessary for the
development of Third World communities over the new colonial frontier
that are the interior spaces of the bodies of women, plants, and animals
(Shiva 1998:11). In such refashioning, Shiva continues to argue with
passion that the global food system is highly corporatized and technology
invested, allowing for the domination of Western Technological Man
through the anti-feminine principles of modernization and development,
subsequently exploiting and subjugating both women and nature. In

particular, she has exposed what can

apparatus/dispositif she labels bioparacy3.

be

called

biopolitical

1. Vandana Shiva (2000) Stolen Harvest

The notion of activity being purely male was constructed on the
separation of the earth from the see, and on the association of an inert
and empty earth with the passivity of the female. The symbols of the seed
and the earth, therefore, undergo a metamorphosis when cast in a
patriarchal mould; gender relations as well as our perception of nature
and its regeneration are also restructured (1998:47-48)
2. Andrea Nightingale against Shiva
3. Rossi Braidotti against Shiva
4. Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy (2013; 2014), Hayes-Conroy and
Sweet (2014)
5. Raj Patel
Women and girls are disproportionately disempowered through current
processes and politics of food production, consumption, and distribution.
This isnt an accident. Capitalisms gendered division of labor removed
women from the workplace, prohibiting women from teaching, healing,
and engaging in science for centuries. Even though the barriers to
womens participation in the workplace are being dismantled, were very
far from equality. The average wage [for women] is 78 cents on the dollar
in the U.S., and worse elsewhere. That process isnt natural. It was
created and built through history for women to be excluded from the
workplace and only to be brought in during certain times, such as war.
2014, Food Sovereignty as Decolonization, you talk about how
European colonization of North America attacked Indigenous womens
roles, status, and knowledge of food. Women held immense knowledge
about harvesting, use, stewardship, processing, and promotion of
medicinal plants. Women have not always been traditionally in the home,
so to speak.

Andrea Nightingale has inquired how gender inequalities are sustained

in places where women assume the greater part of agricultural work,
throughout her fieldwork in rural Nepalese communities.
3 Shiva does not ascribe to a post-structural or foucauldian position. However, I
consider that her analysis can be phrased in such a way, contributing to the
biopolitical framework of my proposal. This potential has been also recognized by
Braidotti, who stresses that the bodies of the empirical subjects who signify
difference (woman/native/earth or natural others) have become the disposable
bodies of the global economy (2013:111).

. Inequalities between men and women are not only a consequence of

environmental issues, gender is a cause of environmental change in the
sense that gender is inextricably linked to how environments are
produced. When gender is conceptualised as a process, the complex
interplay between gender, environment and other relevant aspects of
social and cultural processes can be analyzed (Nightingale 2006:2).
Following Shiva, Rossi Braidotti advances that Environmental theory
stresses the link between the humanistic emphasis on Man as the
measure of all things and the domination and exploitation of nature and
condemns the abuses of science and technology. Both of them involve
epistemic and physical violence over the structural others and are
related to the European Enlightenment ideal of reason. The worldview
which equated Mastery with rational scientific control over others also
militated against the respect for the diversity of living matters and of
human cultures (2013:48). Similarly contemporary capitalism is biopolitical in that it aims at controlling all that lives. It has already turned
into a form of bio-piracy (Shiva, 1997), because it exploits the
generative powers of women, animals, plants, genes and cells (2013:95)
Vandana Shiva (1997) stresses the extent to which bio-power has
already turned into a form of biopiracy, which calls for very grounded
and concrete political analyses.
Shiva, Vandana. 1997. Biopiracy. The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge.
Boston, MA: South End Press.

While women remain responsible for food provision in the home, the
nature of this caring work of feeding others has shifted over time. Few
families or individuals in households eat all of their meals together.
Household members who work, go to school, or spend time outside the
home often eat breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner away from home
in restaurants, cafeterias, or other food establishments.

Feminist theory has made multiple strides in examining the intersections

between gender, race, ethnicity and class (Narayan 1995; hooks 1998).
Rather than viewing women as a unified category, awareness of this
intersectionality provides a more complex stance to understand women's
work and lives. These intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and class
define who does what work in the food systems and under what
conditions.
Regardless of culture, class, or ethnicity, the majority of women cook and
serve food for their familiesa cultural universal of care and sustenance.

Food work is not merely physical but involves relentless mental and caring
laborplanning meals, worrying about nutrition, and arranging and serving
meals (DeVault 1991).
In solving the food-provision puzzle women typically select food that pleases
other family members, especially their husbands (Sutor and Barbour 1975;
Burt and Hertzler 1978; Schafer and Bohlen 1977).
Thus, although women choose the food from supermarket shelves, their
decisions often reflect the preferences of others. And, if they make the
"wrong" decision, tension, arguments, or violence may ensue. As with other
household work, women experience a fundamental ambivalence between the
tedium and marginalizing aspects of their work and the love and caring they
feel for their families.

The material domain

["material domain" which I find closer to what i'm doing.]
The third domain is concerned with the material aspects of gender relations
throughout the food system, focusing on who controls what while others
become or remain vulnerable. This has been done, for example, through
commodity chain analysis and the sociology of agriculture.
A

commodity chain traces the links between the set of processes and actors along a chain that are
involved in transforming a resource or set of component parts into a finished commodity, which is
finally
distributed
to
consumers.
See
more
at:
http://www.genderanddevelopment.org/page/gendered-commodity-chainsreview#sthash.5sF6GAel.dpuf

1. Stephanie Ware Barrientos gendered commodity chain analysis

The authors observe that the globalization of production has opened up
opportunities for women to enter new areas of paid employment, earn an
income, gain independence and participate more actively in social life.
But it has also created new challenges, as much of this employment is
informal, with poor working conditions and a lack of labour rights, and
has to be carried out in addition to household and family responsibilities.
The globalization of production is increasingly based on integrated global
value chains, in which there are direct linkages between production,
distribution and retailing. A continuum is emerging between formal
and informal work in global production. Gender inequality arises because
men are more likely to be concentrated towards the formal end of the
continuum and women towards the informal end (with some exceptions)
(Barrientos, Kabeer, Hossein 2004:v).
Globalization has changed the role that the various stakeholders can
play in supporting more gender-sensitive policies involving government,
the private sector, trade unions and other civil society organizations
[MISSING OBJECT] to develop more joined up policy initiatives that

are gender sensitive and take into account the changing roles of women
in the world of work and at home (2004:2)
2. Aihwa Ong (?)
3.
the gendered construction of production and consumption practices
remains a major omission in the debates over the relationship between
production and consumption (Lockie and Kitto 2000). Studies of
consumption in the sociology of agriculture typically view consumers as
ungendered subjects. This focus on consumption is driven by a shift in the
politics of resistance in the food system.
Barrientos demonstrates that there is u nderestimation of female work in
agriculture as labour flexibilization policies allow female temporary engagement
in low wage industries such as fruit production in Chile to meet the fruit needs
of the Northern hemispheres appetite for off-season crops during winter.

Mary Douglas in Purity and Danger (1966), claims that policy makers
have to avoid violating food taboos in order to make policies
implementable.
mainstream eaters would remain privileged consumers, benefitting from
the structural inequalities and unpleasant material realities that often
form the contexts in which ethnic food is produced and consumed
Narayan (2013[1997]:159ff) argues food allows to think about how
colonial and postcolonial identities are formed. She engages in a
comparative examination of both location and time (India-Great Britan
and colonial vs post-colonial times) to put forward her thesis on food
colonialism and culinary imperialism as aiding the construction of
identities in contemporary societies, specifically ethnic identities in
Western countries.
Inside food studies Marion Nestl, founder of such a department at NYU
says

Andrea Cornwall explores the emergence within dominant development

discourse of particular ways of thinking about the causes of and solutions
to poverty. It traces and situates shifting narratives on poverty, from the
growth discourse, to poverty reduction using a basic needs approach, to
the neo-liberal approaches reflected in Structural Adjustment
Porgrammes and Social Funds, to Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers,
which place poverty reduction at the centre stage of policy frameworks.
.. she calls for an examination of the what she terms new policy spaces,
including ex-/inclusion dynamics.

[describe what has been done from that 'domain' that is pretty much the precedent of my research]

Feminist critical geography and political ecology overlap in order to advanced

this call. Building on the contributions of feminist political ecology, Jarosz

shows how, parallel to the changes in the global food system, the
(geographically) scaled definitions of food security have also varied in
international food policy. If food security was initially conceived of as a
population problem as it became a popular term during the 1970s in the
international development agenda, where governments were prompted to
act jointly or at the national level, it has since then shifted its focus to the
household and to gendered individuals. Ultimately, scale is constructed
so that it is embodied by the gendered individualthe poor rural woman
in the ambiguous position of being necessary to the attainment of food
security through her gendered responsibilities, but who also threatens
food security by contributing to population growth (Jarosz 2011: 128).
Through a poststructuralist discourse analysis, Jarosz investigates how
international policy has constructed food security as a concept in terms
of geographical scale and gender. By reading relevant policy documents
of the FAO and the World Bank she traces how global food security
policies have shifted the focus of policy action from the global to the
gendered individual, privileging economic growth policies over ending
hunger. Women become pivotal to eradicating world hunger as they
become responsible for the increase agricultural output in order to attain
their own way out of hunger and at the same time responsible of
reducing population growth (Jarosz 2011:127-131). Acknowledging that
efforts to include women from these two international governing
institutions into their analysis is important, Jarosz political-ecological
lenses pin-point that hunger becomes an individual concerned with
economic and technical solutions while erasing any link to the political
economy of access to resources [rephrase].

Variations in body size were a principal means of adjusting the

population to variations in the food supply (Fogel 2004:16).
This conflict between vigorous economic growth and very limited
improvements or reversals in the nutritional status and health of
the majority of the population suggest that the modernization of
the nineteenth century were a precondition for the remarkable
achievements
of
the
twentieth
century,
including
the
unprecedented improvements in the condition of life experienced
by ordinary people (Fogel 2004:19).

What Fogel calls the second Agricultural Revolution started around

A.D. 1700, coincidental with the expansion/solidification of
colonialism.
B. POLITICAL SCIENCE
Policy networks and epistemic communities
1. Epistemic communities are less a "new" international actor or unit of
analysis than they are a vehicle for the development of insightful
theoretical premises about the creation of collective interpretation and
choice. (Adler and Haas 1992:368)

This research is concerned about global connections and the production

of difference. The emergence of Bogotas local policy is committed to
reproducing the global design while at the same time acknowledging and
claiming its local specificities. It is interested in the local-to-global
networks of power and meaning.
[identify the gap in the literature, then restate my main question]
Building on this analysis, I propose to investigate not only the shifts of
scale inside food policy discourse, but also how food policy discourse
varies according to policy-making scale. Jarosz names few examples of
countries with the assumptions that World Bank recommendations were
enforced without paying attention to the national reconfigurations of
FAOs food security policy guidelines. As she mentions, by the 1990s,
food security is indistinguishable from neoliberal development discourse,
which emphasizes competitive entrepreneurial individuality, deregulation
of international trade, an economistic definition of poverty alleviation,
and the privatization and downsizing of social services (2011: 130-131).
I propose to do a similar analysis, but paying close attention to the
Colombian case, where national and municipal-scaled policies were
produced.

In contrast to neofunctionalism, however, we do not

seek to explain the processes by which authority is transferred from the
nation-state to international institutions as problems become more technical
and amenable to the creation of scientifically based common meanings. And we
are not merely interested in analyzing scientific and political styles of thought
as they combine to create various types of world order.11 Instead, we regard
learning as a process that has to do more with politics than with science, turning
the study of political process into a question about who learns what, when, to
whose benefit, and why. (Haas+:370)
we adopt an
ontology that embraces historical, interpretive factors, as well as structural
forces, explaining change in a dynamic way.
how it stands along other literature

Feminist political ecology [resource access issues are deeply embedded

in social relations that are gendered, classed, raced ad power-laden
(Jarosz 2011: 130)]

Agarwal, B. 1992. The Gender and Environment Debate: Lessons

from India. Feminist Studies 18: 11957
Rocheleau, D., Thomas-Slayter, B. and Wangari, E. 1996. Feminist
Political Ecology. Routledge.
Schroeder, R. 1999. Shady Practices: Agroforestry and Gender
Politics in the Gambia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Andrea Nightingale
Andrea Cornwall [poverty/development, participatory methods,
gender, policy spaces]

Decolonial contributions
the politics of knowledge generation as systematic acts of governing,
reducing and controlling knowledges and bodies that do not subscribed
to a Western cannon. The Catholic Church, western science and
mainstream academia were constantly mentioned as sources of
techniques of control.

Contributions from Queer Ecologies

What are the toxic residues of unrecognized or unacknowledged polluted
politics that continue to re-assert the normalized body and the naturalized
environment and therefore impede the potential for forging coalition politics
that move us toward a more just, green, and sustainable future? (Giovanna Di
Chiro)
explore the impact of environmental changes on bodies, peoples resistances,
living and flourishing in the face of major environmental destruction and
climate change. We are interested in how does gender, sexuality and race play
out in these changing environments/ landscapes? How can we form different
imaginaries and think more creatively about research that queers (cracks open)
ecology as it is understood in ecofeminism, science, development, politics and
social movements? How do we understand the emotions, the fears, the changes
on our bodies, desires sense of past, present and future? How can we stay with
the troubles transhumanism, toxic waste, military and economic violence,
embrace messy and multiple identities and labels while searching for a
collective sense of flourishing, learning from different conversations, political,
cultural and social positionings and imaginaries?

Where development studies stand

Development and the United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG) since
the 1990s, their renewed agenda. The role of the promotion of gender equality
(third MDG) and women empowerment. How it became transversal along
development projects, how it has been incorporated into World Bank conditional

transfers, how it has impact evaluation (the difficulties of implementation,

monitoring and assessment). The particularities of gendering food security
projects.
(check who is Klasen, 2005). Gender is now a focus point in most development
projects, also in agricultural and rural development projects (Lambrecht,
Vanlauwe, and Maertens 2014:3)