Challenging Agroecology—Promise and Pitfalls for Agrarian Studies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Within agrarian studies, promoting agroecology is widely held as a key objective to animate progressive change with social and environmental benefits across rural regions. Yet, in practice, many questions remain salient concerning the political economy and social dynamics of agroecological transitions. On the one hand, different visions of agroecology exist in terms of both agricultural practices and their surrounding social relations. While a plurality of visions within the field is often celebrated, this conceptual flexibility can make analysis of what works, why, where, and for whom more challenging. On the other hand, agroecological transitions often present daunting challenges for resource poor farmers: a time lag for agroecological methods to become effective; a switch of markets and associated relationships; and new demands for farm and labour management in conditions of uncertain knowledge and constrained resources. These questions push the field of agrarian studies to move beyond simplified normative presentations of agroecology and grapple with the messy political economy of transitions. What are the social, political, and technical preconditions of success? How do agroecological transitions play out in communities and regions that often have internal divisions and conflicting interests? What are the respective roles—if any—of the state, social movements, or non‐governmental agencies in such processes? And, given the partial adoption of agroecology within various governmental realms, is there a risk of a bifurcation of agriculture wherein there is intensive industrial farming for an agrarian elite and agroecology prescribed for a neo‐subsistence rural poor? To address these themes, the Journal of Agrarian Change asked a series of authors to consider two interlinked questions. First, how does agrarian studies as a field of analysis challenge agroecology by contextualizing agroecological initiatives within the complex dynamics of agrarian change? Second, how do the normative goals and practical experiences of agroecology challenge agrarian studies to widen, adapt or reinvent its empirical foci and analytical tools?
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.063 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.058 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.029 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".