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Workshop in Linz: Agro-Food Change through the Lens of Soy

By: Sjamme van de Voort


During my early university studies, one of the many (MANY!) things that I did not know that I would learn to find interesting during my academic career as a cultural historian, was the idea of value chains in international food regimes. About a week ago, in the Austrian city of Linz (another place I never expected to go with my degree in Latin American studies), I learned how to make a connection between these studies of commodities to my interview-based work.


In Linz, I was invited to present my work with Samira Moretto in a workshop organised by Ernst Langthaler, Gabriel Toeber and Maximilian Martsch. As the aim of the workshop was to assess agro-food globalization and its transformations through the

lens of soy from a social science and humanities perspectives, Samira had written her part of the piece on deforestation of the Atlantic Forrest, while I made use of a preliminary analysis of oral history interviews we had done in Chapecó, in November 2023. The point here was to show how these two widely different vantage points into the history of the region served as windows into a much larger system: that of the plantationocene.


The range of the discussions in the workshop was astonishing. From the subjective historical imaginaries of soy farmers in Brazil in the case of my interviews to the global networks of value chains in commodity industries in the work of Tomaz Fares, Paulina Flores-Martínez & Patricia Prado.


Before the end of the year, our work in Linz will be submitted as a special issue for the Rural History Yearbook in 2025, so stay tuned!


Image: Ernst Langthaler in key-note-conversation with Karin Fischer




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