Video abstract – "Agricultural Justice, Abnormal Justice? An Analysis of Fair Trade's Plantation Problem"

A debate has arisen in the fair trade community regarding the certification of plantation crops. On one side of this debate is Fair Trade USA, which supports plantation certification. On the other is the retailer Equal Exchange, whose leaders fear that fair trade’s longstanding commitment to small farmer cooperatives may be in jeopardy.

Drawing on the two organizations’ experiences with tea plantations and cooperatives in Darjeeling, India, as well as my own ethnographic research, I explore how advocates in the global North identify who counts as a legitimate laboring subject of agricultural justice. For those concerned with policy and practice in global food system governance, this paper frames the limits of working with universalizing frameworks for justice. For development and ethical trade organizations, the analysis identifies some obstacles posed in the work of ‘doing justice’ on behalf of disempowered laborers in the global South…

Sarah BeskyWe’re pleased to present here a video abstract from Sarah Besky. In it, Sarah – who’s an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International and Public Affairs at Brown University – talks about her recently published paper, which is available on Early View now and forthcoming in issue 5 of this year’s volume of Antipode in November.

The Darjeeling DistinctionSarah’s published work includes the award-winning book The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India (University of California Press, 2013), “Looking for work: Placing labor in food studies” (Labor 12[1/2], 2015) and “The labor of terroir and the terroir of labor: Geographical Indication and Darjeeling tea plantations” (Agriculture and Human Values 31[1], 2014), among many other things.


As well as Sarah’s, Antipode 47(5) contains some great essays:

Sliding Scale of Spaces and Dilemmas of Internationalism by Josep Maria Antentas;

The Mobile Politics of Emotions and Social Movement in Oaxaca, Mexico by Iván Arenas;

2 Precious 2 Mine: Post-politics, Colonial Imaginary, or Hopeful Political Moment? by Sophie Bond, Gradon Diprose and Andrew McGregor;

The Family Behind the Farm: Race and the Affective Geographies of Manitoba Pork Production by Kate Cairns, Deborah McPhail, Claudyne Chevrier and Jill Bucklaschuk;

This neighbourhood deserves an espresso bar too”: Neoliberalism, Racialization, and Urban Policy by Anouk de Koning;

Interrogating Madrid’s “Slum of Shame”: Urban Expansion, Race, and Place-Based Activisms in the Cañada Real Galiana by Sophie Gonick;

Material Interventions on the US-Mexico Border: Investigating a Sited Politics of Migrant Solidarity by Leif Johnson;

Urban Pacification and “Blitzes” in Contemporary Johannesburg by Christopher McMichael;

Placing Lefebvre by Joseph Pierce and Deborah Martin;

Storm Drains as Assemblages: The Political Ecology of Flood Risk in Post-Colonial Bangalore by Malini Ranganathan;

Engendering Gramsci: Gender, the Philosophy of Praxis, and Spaces of Encounter in the Climate Caravan, Bangladesh by Paul Routledge;

Spatial Tactics in Criminal Courts and the Politics of Legal Technicalities by Marie-Eve Sylvestre, William Damon, Nicholas Blomley and Céline Bellot; and

Reframing Bi-nationalism in Palestine-Israel as a Process of Settler Decolonisation by Teodora Todorova.

All are available online now.