The UBC Future of Food Global Dialogue Series presents:
Gastón Gordillo, “The Imperial Metropolis: the Infrastructure of the Soy Supply Chain in South America”
January 31, 2018, 12:30pm
Liu Multipurpose Room
In his current ethnographic research, Dr. Gordillo is analyzing the social and spatial impact that agribusiness is having on the western edge of the Gran Chaco in northern Argentina. In particular, he is focusing on the political responses by local people affected by the land grabs, evictions, and deforestation triggered by the global demand for soybeans. He is examining these disruptions and conflicts as the result of the subsumption of rural areas to the planetary Metropolis, which he conceives of as the material infrastructure and high-speed currents of goods and energy that make up globalization.
Research interests: terrain and the materiality of space; violence; affect; ruins and ruination; critical theory and continental philosophy; protests and insurrections; the “soy boom” and resistance to agribusiness in South America; Argentina; the Gran Chaco.
The UBC Future of Food Global Dialogue Series is jointly convened by the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems at UBC Farm, the Liu Institute for Global Issues, UBC Reads Sustainability, an initiative of UBC Sustainability, and the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability.