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
- International Labour Process Conference 2023
- Organiser
- 12/4/2023
- Society for the advancement of Socio-economics
- Participant
- 8/7/2022
- Strengthening the dialogue on slave like work, environmental degradation and globalised commodity chains
- Organiser
- 20/6/2022
- COP26 Reflections
- Participant
- 16/12/2021
- Brazil Seen from the Over There: the ocean that unites us
- Keynote speaker
- 10/10/2021
- FAO Food Summit Independent Dialogue: Defence of agrifood systems
- Participant
- 9/8/2021
More professional activities
Projects
- (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
- UKRI CoA Covid Extension
- Garvey, Brian (Principal Investigator) Portes Virginio, Francis Vinicius (Researcher) Cardesa-Salzmann, Antonio (Researcher)
- UKRI sponsored extension of projects affected by Covid-19
- 01-Jan-2021 - 30-Jan-2021
- UKRI CoA Covid extension
- Garvey, Brian (Principal Investigator) Portes Virginio, Francis Vinicius (Researcher)
- UKRI sponsored extension of projects affected by Covid-19
- 01-Jan-2021 - 30-Jan-2021
- Self-demarcation and scientific protection against pandemic, illegal logging and mining in Brazil's Amazon
- Garvey, Brian (Principal Investigator)
- 15-Jan-2020 - 15-Jan-2022
- SELF-DEMARCATION IN THE TAPAJÓS BASIN: TERRITORIAL RESISTANCE TO FOREST DEVASTATION
- Garvey, Brian (Principal Investigator) Torres, Mauricio (Co-investigator) Rocha, Bruna (Co-investigator)
- A collaboration between the Department of Work, Employment and Organisation and the Amazonian Institute of Family farming, Federal University of Para. In the Tapajós Basin, the traditional riverine community of Montanha and Mangabal have faced what is considered to be the most sophisticated act of land grabbing in the entire Amazon, carried out by the southern company Indussolo, which fraudulently appropriated 1,380,000 hectares3. Despite having its territory recognized as an Agroextractive Settlement the longstanding community is subject to land grabbing, illegal logging and mining.
Our research seeks to support community-based and judicial processes that defend their territorial rights towards the mutual protection of forest and livelihoods at a critical juncture in Amazonia policy - 01-Jan-2020 - 30-Jan-2021
More projects
Address
Work, Employment and Organisation
Duncan Wing
Duncan Wing
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