The Agro-Cultures Research Network is an interdisciplinary initiative launched in 2018 – with an initial two years’ core funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK-AHRC) – that involves academics and non-academics of both the Global North and the Global South interested in connecting up disconnected disciplinary discourses and disparate analytical approaches to culture, alterity and the history of agricultural frontiers in the Amazon. Through a series of events and sustained debates, the research network will increasingly engage diverse audiences and participants who will together to develop new knowledge of the significance of agricultural frontiers in the contemporary world and set the agenda for future work in the interlocking, interdisciplinary study of the history of development and socio-cultural diversity in areas of agricultural expansion and economic intensification in the Amazon region.
The Agro-Cultures network will forge opportunities to debate the socio-cultural trajectory of change in the Amazon with a focus on ‘agro-cultural’ frontiers, that is, the recently established areas of intensive agricultural production. Since the 1970s, different social groups were attracted to the region, leading to intense miscegenation, cultural and linguistic exchanges, relations of identities and of differences, and the socio-ecological tensions between newcomers and long-time residents, but the main cultural and historical dimensions of those ongoing processes have still not been properly examined.
Our intention is to bring together Arts and Humanities scholars, in dialogue with the wider academic and non-academic community, to explore, share, and recreate expressions of the lived experience in agro-cultural frontiers.
The specific objectives of the new network are: