CALACS 2021 Dissertation Prize Winner
It is with great pleasure that CALACS announces the recipient of the 2021 CALACS Outstanding Dissertation Award:
Silvia Cristina Vasquez Olguin, Ph.D.
The Social Production of Space and Nature in Peasant Communities of a Costa Rican Dry Forest
2020 York University
Supervisor: Dr. Anna Zalik
Dr. Vasquez Olguin’s outstanding dissertation examines shifting agrarian relations in Costa Rica by focusing on the ways in which socially-produced space and spatialized social relations unfold in two peasant settlements in the province of Guanacaste. The dissertation speaks to one of the long-standing central questions in the field of peasant studies: the peasantry under capitalist relations of production. Dr. Vasquez Olguin pairs classical and contemporary agrarian studies with socio-spatial theory to demonstrate how these peasant communities have been shaped by state-led land reform and changing agricultural commodity markets, while managing to ensure the survival of subsistence-oriented livelihoods through adaptation and the production of peasant spaces. The dissertation is analytically ambitious and theoretically bold. Conceptually, it involves a creative integration of the classical early-twentieth century work of Russian agrarian economist, Alexander Chayanov, the mid-century thinking of French social theorist, Henri Lefebvre, and the late-twentieth-century frameworks of Latin American theorists of capitalism and the countryside, such as Agustín Cueva and Armando Bartra. Empirically, the dissertation’s original discoveries are rooted in impressive ethnographic, archival, and oral-historical research. With careful mediations between high theoretical abstraction and concrete, grounded detail, Dr. Vasquez Olguin maps the interaction of changes in the natural environment, political economy, intergenerational dynamics, and gender relations. The dissertation makes essential analytical contributions to the diverse fields of environmental sociology, political ecology, environmental history, and gender studies.
Congratulations Dr. Vasquez Olguin!
2021 CALACS Prize for Emerging Scholars
Carmen Ponce: “Intra-seasonal climate variability and crop diversification strategies in the Peruvian Andes: A word of caution on the sustainability of adaptation to climate change.” World Development, 127 (2020), pp. 1-23.
The jury unanimously agreed on the selection of this peer-reviewed paper for the 2021 Emerging Scholar Award. This compelling article examines the impact of climate change on agricultural systems and is based on a sophisticated theoretical analysis supported by a superb command of quantitative data analysis. Taking as a point of reference the Peruvian Andes, Ponce explains how peasant producers, who tend to receive scant state support, respond to climate change by means of crop diversification. The analysis of the benefits and drawbacks of crop diversification is supported by the quantitative data that combines district-level socio-economic data from two agrarian censuses (1994 and 2012) with district-level climate estimates of mean temperature, temperature range and precipitation (1964–1994 and 1982–2012). The jury considers that Ponce’s article artfully highlights the importance of studying the impact of climate change on Latin America agricultural systems.
Carmen is a CERLAC Visiting Researcher
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