Madeleine Fairbairn
Biographic Data
| ID | 139383 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Madeleine Fairbairn |
| GIVEN NAMES | Madeleine |
| FAMILY NAME | Fairbairn |
| SIGNATURE | FAIRBAIRN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Cruz |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0168-4179 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 503 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Rural movements within and against rentier capitalism
We respond to the thoughtful commentaries by elaborating on the tensions around rights, the challenges of organizing under rentier capitalism, and the potential for solidarity – or at least temporary alliance – in the context of incommensurabilities. We remain agnostic about the concept of a right to the rural, but convinced of the need to build broad popular movements
Contemporary Land Transitions in the United States
Agricultural land in the United States is currently undergoing a major transition. Seventy percent of land is expected to change hands in the next 20 years, with many existing farmers ready to retire and lacking heirs interested in agriculture. This moment is not lost on financial institutions, which are buying up land in search of new sources of rentier profit, further fueling land concentration. At the same time, beginning farmers are strugglin…
Towards a right to the rural
Inspired by geographical work on the right to the city, there is nascent scholarly interest in a right to the rural. Given that the concept has proven useful in the urban context for both scholars and organizers, it is indeed worth considering its intellectual and political potential in the countryside. We survey the use of the right to the city by both scholars and social movements, as well as nascent efforts to apply this theoretical framework …
Agrarian Platform Capitalism
With the rise of digital technologies, a political‐economic configuration recognised as “platform capitalism” has raised concerns over monopolistic tendencies, lack of accountability, expanded rentiership, workers’ precarity, and more. Existing analyses, however, show a distinctly urban bias—centring on housing, transportation, retail, and gig labour—and have yet to engage with the agrarian dimensions of this phenomenon despite considerable poten…
Garden as society
Despite the benefits of ecological complexity, tidy and ecologically simple landscapes are the hegemonic aesthetic norm in many rural and urban settings. In rural agriculture, tidy landscapes of perfectly spaced, weed-free rows are often taken as an indication of farmer skill. Meanwhile, suburban yard owners face cultural pressures to maintain immaculate lawns through intensive lawn care regimens. In both contexts, an aesthetic of tidiness can co…
Decoupling From Land or Extending the View
Beginning around 2013, an agri-food tech sector coalesced, proffering countless technologies that promise a more sustainable food future. Yet exactly what that future looks like varies dramatically within the sector. Based on an intensive study of this sector, we examine two paradigmatic areas of innovation-alternative protein and digital agriculture-showing how the environmental promises of each translate into very different ideal uses of space.…
Between maintenance and transformation
Agricultural extension has long been the subject of scholarly critiques for its hierarchical approach to knowledge transfer and its complicity in promoting agricultural intensification and farm sector consolidation. Here, however, we suggest that there are already-existing examples of different kinds of agricultural extension practices, ones that challenge the capitalist—understood here as synonymous with racial capitalist—paradigm that dominates…
Speculating on collapse
Circa 2023, after receiving much hype and investment, two agri-food technologies touted for their world-changing potential, bioengineered animal protein substitutes and vertical (indoor) farms, began to falter economically. Tech sector observers attributed the fall to typical hype cycle dynamics; this paper provides a deeper read. Based on research involving over ninety interviews with agri-food tech sector actors and observation at nearly 100 in…
The incumbent advantage
The agri-food tech sector is touted for its potential to disrupt established industry. Yet research reveals that incumbent agribusinesses are buying their way into the sector through startup investments and acquisitions. Drawing from extensive qualitative research, we show that incumbent influence also shapes agri-food tech in more subtle and pervasive ways. Startups rely on incumbents' social and material infrastructure to achieve the rapid grow…
Setting data free
Open data is increasingly being promoted as a route to achieve food security and agricultural development. This article critically examines the promotion of open agri-food data for development through a document-based case study of the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative as well as through interviews with open data practitioners and participant observation at open data events. While the concept of openness is strikin…
Pitching agri-food tech
Food and agriculture have recently become focal points of tech sector innovation and financing. Rapidly multiplying agri-food tech startups are promising to import the tech sector's trademark disruptive innovation into an industry they deem sclerotic, inefficient, and unsustainable. This paper interrogates the cultural and market frictions attending Silicon Valley's foray into food and agriculture through the lens of what is perhaps the tech sect…
What owns the land
Novel investment vehicles continue to dominate discussions of the financial entities driving the global land rush. However, less attention has been devoted to the mundane elements of such investment, primarily the corporate structure that undergirds it. Using US public records, our analysis reveals how absentee and complex corporate structures enable the financialization of farmland. While the latest farmland investment has the fresh face of the …
Agri-Food Systems and the Anthropocene
Understanding the Anthropocene—as both a set of physiological phenomena and as an existential crisis of modernity—requires interrogating Earth-changing transformations in food and agriculture. Agri-food systems are not only at the core of alarming environmental trends; they also offer opportunities to directly engage important challenges to the Anthropocene concept. Many human geographers and other social scientists have raised critiques of the A…
Fields of Gold
In vino veritas, in aqua lucrum
Agri-food tech discovers silver linings in the pandemic
Gated gardens
Investing for profit, investing for impact
The recent global boom in agricultural investment has spurred much normative critique of "land grabbing," but amidst this critical scrutiny investor morality has remained a black box. This article examines the role of ethical narratives in advancing the financialization of nature by comparing how agricultural investment projects are pitched and implemented among two different groups of investors: mainstream agricultural investors and impact inves…
Reinventing the wheel? Or adding new air to old tires
Brett Christophers’ nuanced critique of the concept of financialization provides a useful check on its exuberant adoption within human geography and other disciplines. While acknowledging the article’s important and timely intervention, I question Christophers’ overriding concern with financialization’s lack of novelty. Drawing examples from the financialization of land, I argue that the (undeniable) existence of historical parallels and prior th…
Introducing
Foreignization, Financialization and Land Grab Regulation
The global rush for land has provoked diverse policy responses from host countries. While some governments are facilitating 'land grabs' within their borders, others have restricted land acquisitions by foreigners. Drawing from the Brazilian case, I argue that such restrictive regulations may be limited in their effectiveness because they apply a state-centric geopolitical logic to a threat that is largely de-territorialized and financialized. Th…
Introduction
For four decades, The Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) has served as a principal arena for the formation and dissemination of cutting-edge research and theory. It is globally renowned as a key site for documenting and analyzing variegated trajectories of agrarian change across space and time. Over the years, authors have taken new angles as they reinvigorated classic questions and debates about agrarian transition, resource access and rural livel…
Like gold with yield
Since 2007, capital markets have acquired a newfound interest in agricultural land as a portfolio investment. This phenomenon is examined through the theoretical lens of financialization. On the surface the trend resembles a sort of financialization in reverse - many new investments involve agricultural production in addition to land ownership. Farmland also fits well into current financial discourses, which emphasize getting the right kind of ex…
Indirect Dispossession
Rather than treating the global land grab as a top-down phenomenon driven by global markets or foreign states, this article instead highlights the crucial mediating role played by the host state and domestic elites through a case study of Mozambique. I first introduce the domestic institutional framework, particularly the national Land Law and the institutions that determine the economic value of land. I then argue for an analysis of large-scale …
Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice - By Jill L. Harrison
Like gold with yield
Since 2007, capital markets have acquired a newfound interest in agricultural land as a portfolio investment. This phenomenon is examined through the theoretical lens of financialization. On the surface the trend resembles a sort of financialization in reverse - many new investments involve agricultural production in addition to land ownership. Farmland also fits well into current financial discourses, which emphasize getting the right kind of ex…
Introduction
For four decades, The Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) has served as a principal arena for the formation and dissemination of cutting-edge research and theory. It is globally renowned as a key site for documenting and analyzing variegated trajectories of agrarian change across space and time. Over the years, authors have taken new angles as they reinvigorated classic questions and debates about agrarian transition, resource access and rural livel…
Indirect Dispossession
Rather than treating the global land grab as a top-down phenomenon driven by global markets or foreign states, this article instead highlights the crucial mediating role played by the host state and domestic elites through a case study of Mozambique. I first introduce the domestic institutional framework, particularly the national Land Law and the institutions that determine the economic value of land. I then argue for an analysis of large-scale …
Pitching agri-food tech
Food and agriculture have recently become focal points of tech sector innovation and financing. Rapidly multiplying agri-food tech startups are promising to import the tech sector's trademark disruptive innovation into an industry they deem sclerotic, inefficient, and unsustainable. This paper interrogates the cultural and market frictions attending Silicon Valley's foray into food and agriculture through the lens of what is perhaps the tech sect…
What owns the land
Novel investment vehicles continue to dominate discussions of the financial entities driving the global land rush. However, less attention has been devoted to the mundane elements of such investment, primarily the corporate structure that undergirds it. Using US public records, our analysis reveals how absentee and complex corporate structures enable the financialization of farmland. While the latest farmland investment has the fresh face of the …
Investing for profit, investing for impact
The recent global boom in agricultural investment has spurred much normative critique of "land grabbing," but amidst this critical scrutiny investor morality has remained a black box. This article examines the role of ethical narratives in advancing the financialization of nature by comparing how agricultural investment projects are pitched and implemented among two different groups of investors: mainstream agricultural investors and impact inves…
Framing transformation
Foreignization, Financialization and Land Grab Regulation
The global rush for land has provoked diverse policy responses from host countries. While some governments are facilitating 'land grabs' within their borders, others have restricted land acquisitions by foreigners. Drawing from the Brazilian case, I argue that such restrictive regulations may be limited in their effectiveness because they apply a state-centric geopolitical logic to a threat that is largely de-territorialized and financialized. Th…
The incumbent advantage
The agri-food tech sector is touted for its potential to disrupt established industry. Yet research reveals that incumbent agribusinesses are buying their way into the sector through startup investments and acquisitions. Drawing from extensive qualitative research, we show that incumbent influence also shapes agri-food tech in more subtle and pervasive ways. Startups rely on incumbents' social and material infrastructure to achieve the rapid grow…
Gated gardens
Agri-Food Systems and the Anthropocene
Understanding the Anthropocene—as both a set of physiological phenomena and as an existential crisis of modernity—requires interrogating Earth-changing transformations in food and agriculture. Agri-food systems are not only at the core of alarming environmental trends; they also offer opportunities to directly engage important challenges to the Anthropocene concept. Many human geographers and other social scientists have raised critiques of the A…
Agri-food tech discovers silver linings in the pandemic
Speculating on collapse
Circa 2023, after receiving much hype and investment, two agri-food technologies touted for their world-changing potential, bioengineered animal protein substitutes and vertical (indoor) farms, began to falter economically. Tech sector observers attributed the fall to typical hype cycle dynamics; this paper provides a deeper read. Based on research involving over ninety interviews with agri-food tech sector actors and observation at nearly 100 in…
Towards a right to the rural
Inspired by geographical work on the right to the city, there is nascent scholarly interest in a right to the rural. Given that the concept has proven useful in the urban context for both scholars and organizers, it is indeed worth considering its intellectual and political potential in the countryside. We survey the use of the right to the city by both scholars and social movements, as well as nascent efforts to apply this theoretical framework …
Decoupling From Land or Extending the View
Beginning around 2013, an agri-food tech sector coalesced, proffering countless technologies that promise a more sustainable food future. Yet exactly what that future looks like varies dramatically within the sector. Based on an intensive study of this sector, we examine two paradigmatic areas of innovation-alternative protein and digital agriculture-showing how the environmental promises of each translate into very different ideal uses of space.…
Setting data free
Open data is increasingly being promoted as a route to achieve food security and agricultural development. This article critically examines the promotion of open agri-food data for development through a document-based case study of the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative as well as through interviews with open data practitioners and participant observation at open data events. While the concept of openness is strikin…
In vino veritas, in aqua lucrum
Reinventing the wheel? Or adding new air to old tires
Brett Christophers’ nuanced critique of the concept of financialization provides a useful check on its exuberant adoption within human geography and other disciplines. While acknowledging the article’s important and timely intervention, I question Christophers’ overriding concern with financialization’s lack of novelty. Drawing examples from the financialization of land, I argue that the (undeniable) existence of historical parallels and prior th…
Agrarian Platform Capitalism
With the rise of digital technologies, a political‐economic configuration recognised as “platform capitalism” has raised concerns over monopolistic tendencies, lack of accountability, expanded rentiership, workers’ precarity, and more. Existing analyses, however, show a distinctly urban bias—centring on housing, transportation, retail, and gig labour—and have yet to engage with the agrarian dimensions of this phenomenon despite considerable poten…
Framing transformation
Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice - By Jill L. Harrison
Indirect Dispossession
Rather than treating the global land grab as a top-down phenomenon driven by global markets or foreign states, this article instead highlights the crucial mediating role played by the host state and domestic elites through a case study of Mozambique. I first introduce the domestic institutional framework, particularly the national Land Law and the institutions that determine the economic value of land. I then argue for an analysis of large-scale …
Introduction
For four decades, The Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) has served as a principal arena for the formation and dissemination of cutting-edge research and theory. It is globally renowned as a key site for documenting and analyzing variegated trajectories of agrarian change across space and time. Over the years, authors have taken new angles as they reinvigorated classic questions and debates about agrarian transition, resource access and rural livel…
Like gold with yield
Since 2007, capital markets have acquired a newfound interest in agricultural land as a portfolio investment. This phenomenon is examined through the theoretical lens of financialization. On the surface the trend resembles a sort of financialization in reverse - many new investments involve agricultural production in addition to land ownership. Farmland also fits well into current financial discourses, which emphasize getting the right kind of ex…
Reinventing the wheel? Or adding new air to old tires
Brett Christophers’ nuanced critique of the concept of financialization provides a useful check on its exuberant adoption within human geography and other disciplines. While acknowledging the article’s important and timely intervention, I question Christophers’ overriding concern with financialization’s lack of novelty. Drawing examples from the financialization of land, I argue that the (undeniable) existence of historical parallels and prior th…
Introducing
Foreignization, Financialization and Land Grab Regulation
The global rush for land has provoked diverse policy responses from host countries. While some governments are facilitating 'land grabs' within their borders, others have restricted land acquisitions by foreigners. Drawing from the Brazilian case, I argue that such restrictive regulations may be limited in their effectiveness because they apply a state-centric geopolitical logic to a threat that is largely de-territorialized and financialized. Th…
Gated gardens
Investing for profit, investing for impact
The recent global boom in agricultural investment has spurred much normative critique of "land grabbing," but amidst this critical scrutiny investor morality has remained a black box. This article examines the role of ethical narratives in advancing the financialization of nature by comparing how agricultural investment projects are pitched and implemented among two different groups of investors: mainstream agricultural investors and impact inves…
Fields of Gold
In vino veritas, in aqua lucrum
Agri-food tech discovers silver linings in the pandemic
Agri-Food Systems and the Anthropocene
Understanding the Anthropocene—as both a set of physiological phenomena and as an existential crisis of modernity—requires interrogating Earth-changing transformations in food and agriculture. Agri-food systems are not only at the core of alarming environmental trends; they also offer opportunities to directly engage important challenges to the Anthropocene concept. Many human geographers and other social scientists have raised critiques of the A…
Pitching agri-food tech
Food and agriculture have recently become focal points of tech sector innovation and financing. Rapidly multiplying agri-food tech startups are promising to import the tech sector's trademark disruptive innovation into an industry they deem sclerotic, inefficient, and unsustainable. This paper interrogates the cultural and market frictions attending Silicon Valley's foray into food and agriculture through the lens of what is perhaps the tech sect…
What owns the land
Novel investment vehicles continue to dominate discussions of the financial entities driving the global land rush. However, less attention has been devoted to the mundane elements of such investment, primarily the corporate structure that undergirds it. Using US public records, our analysis reveals how absentee and complex corporate structures enable the financialization of farmland. While the latest farmland investment has the fresh face of the …
Setting data free
Open data is increasingly being promoted as a route to achieve food security and agricultural development. This article critically examines the promotion of open agri-food data for development through a document-based case study of the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) initiative as well as through interviews with open data practitioners and participant observation at open data events. While the concept of openness is strikin…
Between maintenance and transformation
Agricultural extension has long been the subject of scholarly critiques for its hierarchical approach to knowledge transfer and its complicity in promoting agricultural intensification and farm sector consolidation. Here, however, we suggest that there are already-existing examples of different kinds of agricultural extension practices, ones that challenge the capitalist—understood here as synonymous with racial capitalist—paradigm that dominates…
Speculating on collapse
Circa 2023, after receiving much hype and investment, two agri-food technologies touted for their world-changing potential, bioengineered animal protein substitutes and vertical (indoor) farms, began to falter economically. Tech sector observers attributed the fall to typical hype cycle dynamics; this paper provides a deeper read. Based on research involving over ninety interviews with agri-food tech sector actors and observation at nearly 100 in…
The incumbent advantage
The agri-food tech sector is touted for its potential to disrupt established industry. Yet research reveals that incumbent agribusinesses are buying their way into the sector through startup investments and acquisitions. Drawing from extensive qualitative research, we show that incumbent influence also shapes agri-food tech in more subtle and pervasive ways. Startups rely on incumbents' social and material infrastructure to achieve the rapid grow…
Contemporary Land Transitions in the United States
Agricultural land in the United States is currently undergoing a major transition. Seventy percent of land is expected to change hands in the next 20 years, with many existing farmers ready to retire and lacking heirs interested in agriculture. This moment is not lost on financial institutions, which are buying up land in search of new sources of rentier profit, further fueling land concentration. At the same time, beginning farmers are strugglin…
Towards a right to the rural
Inspired by geographical work on the right to the city, there is nascent scholarly interest in a right to the rural. Given that the concept has proven useful in the urban context for both scholars and organizers, it is indeed worth considering its intellectual and political potential in the countryside. We survey the use of the right to the city by both scholars and social movements, as well as nascent efforts to apply this theoretical framework …
Agrarian Platform Capitalism
With the rise of digital technologies, a political‐economic configuration recognised as “platform capitalism” has raised concerns over monopolistic tendencies, lack of accountability, expanded rentiership, workers’ precarity, and more. Existing analyses, however, show a distinctly urban bias—centring on housing, transportation, retail, and gig labour—and have yet to engage with the agrarian dimensions of this phenomenon despite considerable poten…
Garden as society
Despite the benefits of ecological complexity, tidy and ecologically simple landscapes are the hegemonic aesthetic norm in many rural and urban settings. In rural agriculture, tidy landscapes of perfectly spaced, weed-free rows are often taken as an indication of farmer skill. Meanwhile, suburban yard owners face cultural pressures to maintain immaculate lawns through intensive lawn care regimens. In both contexts, an aesthetic of tidiness can co…
Decoupling From Land or Extending the View
Beginning around 2013, an agri-food tech sector coalesced, proffering countless technologies that promise a more sustainable food future. Yet exactly what that future looks like varies dramatically within the sector. Based on an intensive study of this sector, we examine two paradigmatic areas of innovation-alternative protein and digital agriculture-showing how the environmental promises of each translate into very different ideal uses of space.…
Political science (17 works) · Economics (14 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (13 works) · Politics (12 works) · Geography (11 works) · Business (10 works) · Agriculture (9 works) · Organic Food and Agriculture (9 works) · Law (8 works)