12:20pm to 1:10pm |
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Urban Homegardens in the Rainforest: Women and the Circulation of Plants in an Amazon City
(Special Event)
The first Women in International Development (WID) discussion for the Spring 2012 series will take place on Friday, January 27, featuring Dr. Antoinette WinklerPrins, the Program Director for the Geography and Spatial Science Division of the National Science Foundation and a geography professor at Michigan State University. Her talk is titled 'Urban Homegardens in the Rainforest: Women and the Circulation of Plants in an Amazon City.'
Rapid urbanization continues in the Amazon region of Brazil without substantial economic development and the creation of wage-earning opportunities for recent arrivals. Not surprisingly, this leads to significant reliance on the informal sector for survival in the city. This presentation highlights the spontaneous urban agriculture on the part of recent migrants from a rural region of the municipality of Santarem, Para who rely on the production of crops and other plant material in their homegardens as a means of self-provisioning and demonstrates important aspects of this form of agriculture in the city. Women are the keepers of these homegardens, and these places display significant agrodiversity and have become spaces of in-situ conservation of neo-tropical as well as old world species and varieties. This suggests a need to be more inclusinve in conceptualizing strategies of agrobiodiversity conservation in the region. It also demonstrates that cultivation of crops and medicinals in the space about dwellings provisions households with critical foods and medicines that can be consumed, gifted, bartered, or sold. This offers a small measure of food and financial security to newly urbanized households, especially their female members, and is a strategy that could be supported through appropriate local policy.
Dr. WinklerPris is funded in part by the Women and Minority Artists and Scholars Lecture Series (WMASLS) from the Office of the Provost at Virginia Tech.
This discussion will take place in McBryde Hall (225 Stanger Street, Room 136, from 12:20 - 1:10. Please note that this in not the usual WID discussion venue; it will also be part of the Geography Department's Colloquium. Feel free to bring your lunch!
The WIF program has sponsored a discussion series for the past several years, giving students and professionals an opportunity to share their research and discuss issues of women in international development. Students, faculty, staff, and members of the community are encouraged to attend the discussions and bring their ideas and questions. For the Spring 2012 discussion series schedule, see our WIF Discussion Series Events page:
http://www.oired.vt.edu/wid/events.html More information...
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