From Seed Sovereignty to "Self-Reliance": Shifting Relationships Between People and Plants in Mae La Camp

Lunch talk by Terese Gagnon, Postdoc at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen

Terese Gagnon

Bio

Terese Gagnon is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Syracuse University. Her research examines Karen food, seed, and political sovereignty across homelands and diaspora. She is co-editor of the book Movable Gardens: Itineraries and Sanctuaries of Memory.

Abstract

In this talk, I illustrate the ways in which the process of becoming refugees in Mae La refugee camp in Thailand (technically a “temporary shelter”) severs Indigenous seed sovereignty and inter-generational agricultural memory for forcibly displaced Karen people. This severing occurs in the camp in large part through agricultural forgetting: the process by which linkages between people and plants are broken generationally. Along with dispossession and exile, such enforced forgetting is facilitated by the enclosure of the commons and commercialization. I argue that agricultural forgetting emerges in especially forceful ways in the camp, where the ruptures caused by displacement clear the slate for new more-than-human social arrangements. Such an account of agriculture in the camp is a necessary corrective to upbeat discourses of livelihoods programs promoting refugee “self-reliance.” This is because livelihoods programs and their promotion of self-reliance in the context of closed encampment obscure the enforced epistemological and bodily forgetting taking place. This forgetting, I suggest, takes place across generations of both people and plants in this space of exception. 

This is a hybrid event.
Join us in room 4.2.49 at CSS or sign up here to receive Zoom link

Coming lunch talks at NIAS

The format is 20-30 minutes presentation followed by discussion. Feel free to bring your own lunch.