Organized by Hilary Faxon (University of Montana) and Christian Lund (University of Copenhagen)

Something is afoot in the agrarian world. Around the globe, peasants, migrants, companies, and governments, even the land itself, are doing things that defy the expectations of both dominant and critical scholars. Scholars have underestimated the peasantry at least since Marx categorized their political consciousness as akin to a sack of potatoes; individualized, fatalistic, and with no sense of a class project of emancipation. In contrast, this Symposium starts from the premise that counterintuitive behaviors do not stem from false consciousness, nor are they indicative of researcher ignorance. Rather, the un-scripted opportunities, reactions, and developments are diagnostic events for the unfolding of pathbreaking trajectories. Such events reveal ongoing and changing contests and conflicts and the efforts to curtail and suppress them. Sudden breaks with the anticipated dynamics and teleological predictions call for new explanations. Indeed, they call for new ways of asking questions about the changes in rural lives. It calls for attention to a wider spectrum of data, and possibly new ways of probing.

The Symposium explores what we call post-agrarian questions: new inquiries that arise from the collision of existing socio-ecological forms, intimately tied to agriculture, and new economic and cultural realities that are reworking land relations. Formulating post-agrarian questions helps us to unravel surprises in the countryside. As an analytical approach, post-agrarian questions challenge both conventional views of agrarian transition and Marxist formulations of agrarian questions by emphasizing the ways in which agrarian formations linger even as the rural transforms.

The articles — available online now, and forthcoming in Antipode volume 57, number 6 in November 2025

Introduction—Post-Agrarian Questions by Hilary Faxon (University of Montana) and Christian Lund (University of Copenhagen)

Salt and Power: Making Sense of Loss in a Changing Climate through Scalar Politics by Kelly Dorkenoo (Lund University)

Left to Live and Die: Resource Security and the Biopolitics of Land Stockpiling in China by Ross Doll (University of California, Berkeley)

Deserts of Wind: Aeolian-Pastoralism and the Limits of Climate Finance in Jordan by Kendra Kintzi (Cornell University)

“Build the New City as Fast as Possible”: Speculation as Subsistence in Peri-Urban Myanmar by Courtney T. Wittekind (Purdue University)

Labour Abroad as a Struggle for Land: Young Migrants’ Dream of a Rural Return to Myanmar by Sofie Mortensen (University of Copenhagen)

The Inevitability of Leaving and the Impossibility of Staying Away: Rural Youth Migration in Flores, Indonesia by Jessica N. Clendenning (LMU Munich)

Assembling for Water: The Prefigurative Politics of Land Futures in Argentina by Mattias Borg Rasmussen (University of Copenhagen) and Maximiliano Navarrete (Independent researcher, Argentina)

Agrarian Modernity—Coda by Christian Lund (University of Copenhagen) and Hilary Faxon (University of Montana)

Featured image: Utility-scale wind farm in Tafila, Jordan, where herding, grazing, and other forms of hybrid land use are woven into the spaces between the turbines (source: Kendra Kintzi, Cornell University)