Co-sponsored by Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions (SEACoast)

The talk will argue that land struggles as framed by agrarian, food and environmental justice movements have regained academic and political importance in recent years, but that in the era of fragmented working classes and environmental/climate crisis, these require rethinking and reframing. Mapping contemporary land issues of working classes, the talk will emphasise the need to look into the changing social dynamics in rural-urban, agriculture-nonagriculture continuum/corridor and production/social reproduction, and land/labour entanglements as useful reference points to think about political struggles around land and labour, livelihoods and ecological sustainability along class and intersecting axes of social differences (race/ethnicity, gender, generation). The talk will explore the small but important role played or ought to be played by scholar-activists in these political struggles. The talk will mobilise insights from Southeast Asia country cases (and by extension, southern China), and from some African countries and Colombia where I have ongoing field research.

Jun Borras is a Filipino migrant worker currently working as professor of agrarian studies at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam in The Hague, Netherlands. He is a long-time agrarian movement activist in the Philippines and internationally. He was a member of the International Coordinating Committee of the La Via Campesina during its formative years, in 1993-1996. He is a recipient of the European Research Council Advanced Grant, enabling him to study how land rushes shape global social life, and does fieldwork for this in Southeast Asia and China, Ethiopia and Colombia. He works in the tradition of, and at the same time studies, scholar-activism. He was Editor-In-Chief of Journal of Peasant Studies for 15 years until 2023. He co-organizes the regular International Writeshop in Critical Agrarian Studies and Scholar-Activism meant for PhD researchers and early career scholars from/in the Global South.

The Center for Cultural Studies hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work by faculty and visitors. We gather at 12:00 PM, with presentations beginning at 12:15 PM.

Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.