Personal statement
My current research investigates local and global tensions regarding labour, land use and commodification of natural resources. I have a particular interest in Scottish land reform, mineral prospecting in Ireland and the territorial demarcations and resistance by agrarian, traditional and indigenous communities in the Global South. I currently work closely with academics and civil society organisations in Scotland, Europe, Africa, Brazil and Latin America and share an ambition to challenge Eurocentric and colonial paradigms in our collective research. I am co-founder of the Centre for the Political Economy of Labour, which seeks to reflect this ambition in its praxis.
Teaching
At the Department of Work, Employment and Organisation, I teach on several undergraduate and MSc courses and focus on labour, migration, organisational strategies and collective resistance linked to globalised commodity chains and extractive industries. I have supervised PhD and post doctoral studies on south-south migration, pesticide harm, forestry and land reform, labour organisation and gender, and community repsonses to dispoessession and deindustrialisation. I welcome interest from potential PhD candidates on any of the broad themes of my research.
Professional activities
- Gender, Work and Organisation
- Speaker
- 28/6/2023
- Universidade Federal do Para
- Visiting researcher
- 6/5/2023
- International Labour Process Conference 2023
- Organiser
- 12/4/2023
- Sustainability month Strathclyde
- Organiser
- 1/3/2023
- “Illegal Gold Mining: Brazil, eco-destruction and resource theft in global commodity chains”
- Speaker
- 17/2/2023
- The interloping networks of terror, territory and primary commodity extraction on Brazil's Amazonian frontier
- Speaker
- 1/2/2023
More professional activities
Projects
- Jumping the fence: transgressing knowledge enclosures of the land-food-environment nexus
- Garvey, Brian (Principal Investigator) Combe, Malcolm (Co-investigator) Vecchione, Marcela (Co-investigator)
- This project explores social tensions and ecological implications of both incumbent agricultural monocultures and of the transition of land use towards large scale ‘green’ projects. By considering the inequitable access to land, political power, finance and technology that are often masked by ‘greening’ projects, the project brings creative and transformative methods derived from traditional communities of Brazil into dialogue with community and academic practitioners in Scotland and the Amazon region of Brazil. It does so to creatively investigate disruption to unjust but apparently ‘locked-in’ land use practices towards diversified land and agrifood systems that promise improved human and environmental health outcomes.
- 01-Jan-2023 - 29-Jan-2024
- Global Engagements Federal University of Mato Grosso
- Garvey, Brian (Principal Investigator) del Bel, Haya (Co-investigator)
- Incoming visit of Professor Haya del Bel towards institutional agreement with Nucleus of Social Health and Environment Studies, Federal University of Mato Grosso
- 09-Jan-2023 - 01-Jan-2023
- Cultivating a nexus of land, rights and resistance: pathways to non-destructive future
- Garvey, Brian (Principal Investigator) Mendonca, Maria Luisa (Research Co-investigator)
- Intensified financial speculation in agricultural land linked to futures markets for commodities are contemporary corporate strategies to reduce market volatility and risk. At the same, these strategies are increasing both sanctioned and illegal territorial incursions and traditional community displacement in contravention of international treaties. Transnational incentives for further commodity chain expansion (World Bank, 2020) and to financial trading as a key response to climate change (UN 2021), are rendering acute social and ecological consequences less visible. Conclusions from several interdisciplinary engagements and with affected communities invite the progression of effective networks of praxis that deepen understanding of the complex dynamics across issues of land and territory, human and environmental rights, and revisit, imagine and implement pathways that provide for social and ecological security.
- 01-Jan-2022 - 18-Jan-2022
- (UN)EARTHING NEW PATHWAYS FOR A JUSTICE TRANSITION: CULTIVATING HOPE AND FOOD ON CONTESTED TERRAINS IN SCOTLAND, AMAZON AND THE ARCTIC
- Garvey, Brian (Principal Investigator) Combe, Malcolm (Co-investigator) Shapovalova, Daria (Co-investigator)
- The programme brings together a multidisciplinary team of researchers from Law, Geography, Sociology of Work and Political Economy with leading figures from crofting, smallholding and indigenous communities in Scotland, the Amazon and Arctic.
This project aims to collectively produce and share both ancestral and new academic knowledge across a nexus that is critical to a just transition: the globalised financialisation of land for both the carbon and green economy, smallholder and community access to land, and sustainable production of food. These dimensions come to ground, literally, in arable land that has been an increasingly prized destination for corporate finance, with subsequent rising land prices and a deepening of contestation between commodity and food production. The programme is attentive to new policy instruments in Scotland including land reform, transparency and local empowerment and the plural ways in which other communities negotiate tensions between land asset capture for speculation, monocultures and energy forms on one hand; and rural or forest based livelihoods on the other.
The programme hinges on a hopeful dialogue across these frontiers in order to i) unearth commonality in values, experiences and aspirations for socially and ecologically committed cultivation of land; ii) investigate legal instruments within and across borders for their realisation; iii) make recommendations for effective policy implementation in Scotland. - 01-Jan-2022 - 03-Jan-2022
- (UN)EARTHING NEW PATHWAYS FOR A JUSTICE TRANSITION: CULTIVATING HOPE AND FOOD ON CONTESTED TERRAINS IN SCOTLAND, AMAZON AND THE ARCTIC
- Garvey, Brian (Principal Investigator) Combe, Malcolm (Co-investigator)
- The programme brings together a multidisciplinary team of researchers from Law, Geography, Sociology of Work and Political Economy with leading figures from crofting, smallholding and indigenous communities in Scotland, the Amazon and Arctic.
This project aims to collectively produce and share both ancestral and new academic knowledge across a nexus that is critical to a just transition: the globalised financialisation of land for both the carbon and green economy, smallholder and community access to land, and sustainable production of food. These dimensions come to ground, literally, in arable land that has been an increasingly prized destination for corporate finance, with subsequent rising land prices and a deepening of contestation between commodity and food production. The programme is attentive to new policy instruments in Scotland including land reform, transparency and local empowerment and the plural ways in which other communities negotiate tensions between land asset capture for speculation, monocultures and energy forms on one hand; and rural or forest based livelihoods on the other.
The programme hinges on a hopeful dialogue across these frontiers in order to i) unearth commonality in values, experiences and aspirations for socially and ecologically committed cultivation of land; ii) investigate legal instruments within and across borders for their realisation; iii) make recommendations for effective policy implementation in Scotland.
- 01-Jan-2022 - 31-Jan-2022
- Confronting pandemic, territorial and food insecurity with traditional communities in the Brazilian Amazon
- Garvey, Brian (Principal Investigator) Torres, Mauricio (Co-investigator) Barbosa, Ana Laide (Co-investigator) Rocha, Bruna (Co-investigator)
- GCRF Covid-19 response £29,125.16 FEC with SFC contribution of £24,591.52 (attached)
- 01-Jan-2021 - 31-Jan-2021
More projects
Address
Work, Employment and Organisation
Duncan Wing
Duncan Wing
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