Doctoral Dissertation Research: Farmer Organizations and Development Actors in a Pandemic: Responses to COVID-19 and the Food-Water-Energy Nexus

该奖项的全部或部分资金来自《2021年美国救援计划法案》(公法117-2)。新冠肺炎疫情对农业部门造成了不利影响，导致供应链问题以及其他许多挑战。这些问题由独立的农民、农业集体和发展组织以不同的方式得到缓解。如何在这些不同的规模上组织对大流行的反应会影响到成败。因此，随着大流行的继续发展，大流行环境为了解农业活动成功和失败的原因提供了一个关键窗口。这篇博士论文研究调查了多个地点的农业发展参与者和小规模农民组织对新冠肺炎大流行的反应。除了为培养美国的科学文化人类学博士生做出贡献外，这些研究成果还将广泛传播给学术界和非学术界的受众。这个项目使用复原力理论来调查不同组织级别的农民如何适应持续不断的危机。调查人员关注三个研究问题：1)大流行如何影响资本流动以及谁控制了流动？2)大流行暴露了食品-能源-水系统的脆弱性？3)对这些问题的答案可以揭示建立复原力的机制？通过对在不同规模和地点运作的发展行为者进行的人种学访谈，以及在大流行期间变得更加普遍的虚拟会议空间中的在线参与者观察，这项研究追踪了随着大流行的继续展开，不同农业发展行为者之间的资本、项目资金和想法的流动。这项研究通过整合灾害人类学、发展人类学和政治生态学的方法，为当代人类学做出贡献，以更好地了解流行病应对措施和发展实践中对全球范围内当地生计具有深远影响的变化。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).The COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected the agricultural sector, resulting in supply chain problems among many other challenges. Such problems are mitigated differently by independent farmers, farming collectives, and development organizations. How responses to the pandemic are organized across these different scales affects successes and failures. The pandemic environment thus offers a critical window into the reasons for success and failure in farming activities as the pandemic continues to evolve. This doctoral dissertation research investigates the responses of agricultural development actors and small-scale farmer organizations to the Covid-19 pandemic in multiple locations. In addition to contributing to training a U.S.-based doctoral student in scientific cultural anthropology, the research findings will be disseminated widely to academic and non-academic audiences. This project uses resilience theory to investigate the processes by which farmers at different levels of organization adapt to ongoing crises. The investigators focus on three research questions: 1) How has the pandemic affected the flow of capital and who controls the flow? 2) What are the vulnerabilities in food-energy-water systems exposed by the pandemic? 3) What can answers to these questions reveal about mechanisms to build resiliency? Through ethnographic interviews with development actors operating at different scales and locations, and online participant observation in virtual meeting spaces that have become more prevalent during the time of the pandemic, this study traces the flow of capital, project funding, and ideas between different agricultural development actors as the pandemic continues to unfold. This research contributes to contemporary anthropology by integrating approaches from disaster anthropology, development anthropology, and political ecology to better understand pandemic responses and shifts in development practice with far-reaching implications for local livelihoods on a global scale.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.