Grace Leksana: Rethinking the Margins series
Fair Transitions in collaboration with Critical Pathways presents
Rethinking the Margins series:
Dr. Grace Leksana
Before the Green Revolution: exploring place-based knowledge on food and agriculture before Indonesia’s agricultural industrialization
A seminar co-organised by Fair Transitions and Critical Pathways
Chair: Roman Teshore
Discussants: Janwillem Liebrand and Julia Tschersich
Seminar Synopsis
The way we produce and consume food is no longer dependent on our needs, but on the supra-structural power that constructs our relation to food. The so-called food regime, the interconnectivity between international relations of food production and consumption with forms of accumulation, is controlling our connections to food.
Food production no longer serves the goal of fulfilling people’s needs, but to achieve certain agendas in our neoliberal order, such as free trade agreements or profits for agribusiness companies. In many cases, particularly in countries of the Southern hemisphere, these practices involve forms of violence such as destruction of crops, marginalization of certain groups, and the elimination of farmer’s independence. In Indonesia, this violence took form in the Green Revolution project, intensively applied between late 1960s- 1980s.
While previous studies have focused on the implications of Green Revolution, this project will take a different angle by focusing on what was lost. Involving communities, artists, and academics, this project aims to recover knowledge and connections between people and food which had been eradicated through violent transformations of the Green Revolution. We aim to provide alternative ways of knowing and being through food; and to contribute to the growing discussion on food sovereignty and scarcity through the bottom-up lens of Indonesia’s place-based knowledge.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Grace Leksana is an Assistant Professor in Indonesian history in the Department of History & Art History, Utrecht University. Trained as an Indonesian social historian with interdisciplinary background, her works focus on memory studies, (epistemic) violence & genocide, leftist histories, decolonization, and specific method of oral history. She is the author of Memory culture of the anti Leftist violence in Indonesia: Embedded Remembering (Amsterdam University Press, 2023). She is currently developing a new project on violence, food, and place-based knowledge.
Learn more about Dr. Leksana’s work on her UU staff page.
Practical Information
Date and time: Monday 26 May, 16.00 PM - 17.30 PM
Venue: Room T 1.11, Muntstraat 2-2A, Utrecht University
Rethinking the Margins
An initiative of the IOS Fair Transitions platform
Rethinking the Margins is a seminar series of the IOS Fair Transitions platform, offering a place to radically rethink sustainable development, and envision institutions for the future that safeguard not just ecological boundaries, but also boundaries of fair and just development. By facilitating an interdisciplinary dialogue among various faculties within Utrecht University, and with actors in society, for instance in relation to food production and consumption, and urbanizing deltas, the platform explores the question: How do institutions need to change in order to guarantee safe, inclusive and climate-resilient landscapes and social-ecological environments across the globe? In so doing, we pay specific attention to informal, bottom-up institutions; the relationship between human and non-human species; and the use, access and control of natural resources in the Global South.
Please join us in rethinking the future of open and fair societies.
Do you want to present? Please contact the Fair Transitions Coordinator Nick Polson with the button below!
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