Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

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Ashoka University

This essay introduces and invites contributions to a new Journal of Peasant Studies Forum on ‘climate change and critical agrarian studies'. Climate change is inextricably entwined with contemporary capitalism, but how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world requires deeper analysis. In particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change is a vital focus for both thinking and action. In this essay, we make the connections between climate change and critical agrarian studies and identify competing, although overlapping, narratives. These narratives frame climate change debates and the way that the dynamics of climate change shape and are shaped by the rural world, whether through state policies, international governance, corporate influence, or agrarian struggles. We use a simple framework to examine different logics and strategies for anti-capitalist struggles that might connect climate change and agrarian mobilisations. We conclude with some overall reflections and suggestions for broad, guiding questions for future inquiry as part of the JPS Forum.

World University root node

Department of Environmental Studies

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Journal of Peasant Studies

Climate change and agrarian struggles: an invitation to contribute to a JPS Forum

Since the summer of 2020, Indian farmers have been protesting three laws that aim to liberalize agricultural markets and encourage contract farming. In doing so, they have also mounted the largest challenge to an authoritarian Hindu nationalist government to date. The contributions to this JPS Forum provide deep and diverse insights into these farmer protests, including their social composition and political character, as well as their roots in long-term transformations in markets, ecology, and agrarian—and non-agrarian—political economy. In this introduction, we put these contributions into dialogue with older debates in JPS over India’s ‘new farmers’ movements,’ which reached their zenith in the 1980s, in order to throw into relief what has changed in rural India and in agrarian studies over the subsequent decades. We argue that the polarized terms of the earlier debates—between Marxists and populists—are no longer adequate for the transformed agrarian milieu of the twenty-first century, which is increasingly defined by agrarian distress, ecological crisis, semi-proletarianization and diversification of occupations amidst jobless and exclusionary growth. This new agrarian reality, combined with the significance of the protests in challenging an authoritarian regime, helps to explain not only the broad coalition behind the current farmers’ protests, but their far more sympathetic treatment by agrarian scholars.

The Journal of Peasant Studies

Farmers’ protests in India: introduction to the JPS Forum

The modernist conception of urban order is predicated on state regulation of city spaces and social practices. Street food vending disrupts this idealized order and is therefore denounced by state officials and the bourgeois public. Hamstrung by this hostile discursive field and their own lack of symbolic capital, how do food vendors manage to maneuver their way through an inhospitable city? In this paper, I use ethnographic vignettes from two neighborhoods in Delhi to argue that street vendors and city spaces should not be treated as homogeneous categories; differences among vendors and between urban settings are crucial for explaining heterogeneous survival strategies. These differences relate to ethnic identities derived from diverse histories of migration, as well as to the variegated layout, land use and legal geographies of spaces in the city. I conclude by showing that negotiations over food vending now occur not only on the street, but also through the virtual world of food blogs and videos. By representing street food as a valued part of city culture, the internet has emerged as a new space where the claims of street vendors acquire greater legitimacy in the public sphere.