My research examines the cultivation practices and political organizing of farmers displaced from the countryside due to political violence in Colombia. In particular, I focus on the relationship between people, plants and land as a way to examine displaced farmers' strategies for rebuilding their livelihoods after resettling along Cartagena's urban periphery. My approach is largely ethnographic drawing theoretical and methodological tools from agroecology, political ecology and environmental anthropology. I use a combination of methods-surveys, life history interviews, participant observation, workshops and parcel mapping-to bring forth the specificities of socio-ecological struggles at the intersection of three processes: dispossession, the production of nature and urbanization.
I am currently writing my dissertation which is divided into two parts. First, I discuss how farmers' embodied practices and knowledges, as well as plant cuttings, seeds, and soils travel with them and are re-adapted in new social and ecological contexts. Second, I explore the ways resettled farmers mobilize rural identities and practices to appropriate natural resources within a new set of conflicts concerning resource rights in the city that are increasingly articulated with the urbanization of the armed conflict.
Through my research I strive to reconstruct a history of displacement and resettlement that foregrounds the experiences, memories and aspirations of farmers struggling to overcome the challenges of forced displacement. Their stories and struggles provide a critique of national development and urbanization that can offer inroads for the creation of greener and more socially just cities.
Research interests: agroecology, political ecology, peri-urban agriculture, Colombia, land rights, nature, dispossession, forced displacement, urban geography.
Contact Roseann Cohen by email: rcohen@ucsc.edu |
