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

该奖项全部或部分根据2021年美国救援计划法案（公法117-2）资助。COVID-19疫情对农业部门产生了不利影响，导致供应链问题以及许多其他挑战。独立农民、农业集体和发展组织以不同方式缓解了这些问题。如何在这些不同的规模上组织应对这一流行病的措施影响到成功和失败。因此，大流行的环境提供了一个关键的窗口，随着大流行的继续发展，农业活动的成败原因。本博士论文研究调查了农业发展参与者和小规模农民组织对多个地点的Covid-19大流行的反应。除了帮助训练一名美国-该研究是一项以科学文化人类学博士生为基础的研究，研究成果将广泛传播给学术和非学术受众。该项目利用复原力理论来研究不同组织层次的农民适应持续危机的过程。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着资本流动？2)这一流行病暴露了粮食-能源-水系统的哪些脆弱性？3)这些问题的答案能揭示什么关于建立弹性的机制？通过对不同规模和地点的发展参与者进行人种学访谈，以及在大流行期间变得更加普遍的虚拟会议空间中进行在线参与者观察，本研究追踪了随着大流行的继续展开，不同农业发展参与者之间的资本流动，项目资金和想法。该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，更好地理解流行病应对和发展实践的转变，对全球范围内的当地生计产生深远影响。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值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.