Associate Professor
Phone: (919) 843-4762
E-mail: wwolford@email.unc.edu
Office: Saunders 325
Curriculum Vita (.PDF format)
Related links:
MST (Portuguese)
MST (English)
Excellent site on research design
My husband, John Lynch
My new book on the MST, co-authored with Angus Wright
Available papers:
Wolford,
Wendy (2005). “Agrarian Moral Economies and Neo-liberalism in
Brazil: Competing World-Views and the State in the Struggle
for Land,?in Environment and Planning A, Volume 37, pages
241-261.
2004. "This Land is Ours Now: A New Perspective on Social Movement
Formation," in the Annals of the Association of American
Geographers, 94(2): 409-424.
2004. "Of Land and Labor: Agrarian Reform on the Sugarcane
Plantations of Northeast Brazil," in the Journal of Latin American
Perspectives, 31(2): 147-170.
2003. "Families, Fields, and Fighting for Land: The Spatial
Dynamics of Contention in Rural Brazil," in Mobilization Volume 8,
Number 2.
2001. "From State-Led to Grassroots-Led Land Reform in Latin America," in Access to Land,
Rural Poverty and Public Action, Alain De Janvry, Gustavo Gordillo, Jean-Philippe Platteau,
and Elisabeth Sadoulet eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press (with Alain de Janvry and
Elisabeth Sadoulet).
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INCRA Levantamento (clique aqui)
Research Interests
My research interests include: the
political economy of development; agrarian studies; social
movements; political ecology; land tenure; and social and
economic geography.
My interest in
these fields began in 1993 when I volunteered with a
grassroots social movement in rural
Brazil called the
Movement of Rural Landless Workers (often called simply the
MST). MST members use aggressive direct action to pressure the
Brazilian government to distribute land to the rural and urban
poor. Their re-articulation of federal law through a
collective understanding of property rights has helped
re-shape the debate over citizenship and governance in
post-authoritarian
Brazil.
I am currently involved in
three research projects:
Political Cultures and
the Study of Social Movements:
I have been working with and on the MST for over
12 years now. My research looks at the articulation of work,
family and community in the production of resistance. I pay
particular attention to how people shape space through
resistance and, in turn, how space shapes the nature of
resistance itself. I have several articles and a
co-authored book that deal with these different facets of the
MST in
Brazil. My most
recent manuscript elaborates on the importance of
understanding “common sense?aspects of political culture in
order to explain social movement trajectories. This manuscript is
still in progress, but the paper I presented while a fellow at
the Yale University Program in Agrarian Studies, 2004-2005, is
available on their website.
Governmentality and
Territoriality:
This project
examines the intersection between property, governmentality,
and citizenship. Territorial control and distribution are
perhaps two of the most important features of the modern
nation-state and many national identities rest of particular
understandings of how the body politic was “discovered,?
settled, and worked. I am contributing to this field by
analyzing the increased use of eminent domain property takings
by local, regional and federal governments in the
United
States since 1981. The
paradoxical relationship between state intervention for the
purposes of regressive property distribution and the rise of
neo-liberalism suggests an underlying contradiction between
popular perceptions of property rights in the
United
States and political
practice. In the future, I hope to work with a squatters?
group called Homes Not Jails to understand the dynamics of the
campaign to apply eminent domain for social ends similar to
the MST’s in
Brazil.
Institutional
Ethnography, or Political Ecologies of the State:
This research project involves an
institutional ethnography of one of the most important
government agencies involved in agrarian reform in
Brazil, the
National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform
(INCRA). In overseeing the juridical, technical and
administrative aspects of agrarian reform, INCRA employees
occupy an unusual position, working with both the needs of
social movements and the state to re-distribute land and
foster sustainable development on the new land reform
settlements. By researching the policies, practices and
ideologies of INCRA employees ?and as an institution ?I hope
to “ground the state?in concrete relationships between people
and place and show how historical patterns of land ownership
and management shape the production of government discourse,
policies, and practice. This project is being funded by the
National Science Foundation (2005-2008).
Teaching
Liberating Geographies: People, Places and Practice in the Formation of Resistance, a graduate seminar on social movements.
Research Design: Theory and Practice, a graduate seminar.
Economic Geographies: Place, Politics and Production in Agrarian Development, an upper-level course.
People and Places: Human Geography in a Globalizing World, an introductory class on human geography.
The Political Economy of Development
and Globalization
Political
Ecology
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