Agro-Food Change through the Lens of Soy: (Sub-)National Pathways in a Global Perspective. Rural History Yearbook/Jahrbuch für Geschichte des ländlichen Raumes 22/2025
Editors / Herausgeber: Ernst Langthaler, Markus Schermer
This volume of the Rural History Yearbook assesses agro-food globalization through the lens of soy, as both theoretical and empirical challenge for social sciences and humanities, in a historical perspective. Contributions will aim to overcome the ‘methodological nationalism’ of country-focused agro-food studies as well as the globalist tendency of food regime analysis. As a solution to these problems, we propose investigating (sub‑)national pathways of agro-food change, including the role of nation states and regional movements as powerful actors, with regard to transnational connections and/or by international comparisons. The volume addresses these theoretical challenges empirically through the lens of soy, which has emerged as the world’s biggest agricultural commodity in the ‘long twentieth century’.
Each contribution to the volume shall deal with these challenges within a two-dimensional heuristic field. The first dimension covers the links between global and (sub-)national developments: the role of national policies in inter- and supra-national institutional frameworks, the emergence of regional counter-movements to capitalist globalization, the impact of soy expansions to sites of production and consumption, and so on. The second dimension covers the links between production and consumption within commodity chains and networks, including their social and natural relations: flexible uses of soy-based commodities (beans, oil and cake) and related notions in public discourses (‘bad’ vs. ‘good’), the role of transnational companies in agroindustrial processing and trade, producer-consumer relations and access to segmented commodity markets (‘food from nowhere’ – ‘food from somewhere’), and so on.
In preparation / in Vorbereitung.