Bradley Wilson
Director, Center for Resilient Communities
Associate Professor of Geography
West Virginia University
USA
Research Interests
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Publications
| Food justice accompaniment research: theory and social praxis in West Virginia Over the past three decades West Virginians have experienced a deepening economic crisis. Divestment in coal and manufacturing has resulted in widespread unemployment, state, county and municipal revenue losses, and cascading effects on social services, households, livelihoods and community life. For 10 years, FJL has conducted ethnographic research, coordinated cooperative experiments, and built pedagogical tools to democratize knowledge about West Virginia’s food system amidst this crisis. Working in a so-called red state, we have fostered conversations about food justice with rural, often socially conservative communities, and have worked to raise up human resources for meaningful community-led food justice organizing in Central Appalachia. In this paper, we consider the long accompaniment process with community partners and the effects of this experience on the evolution of research questions and actions. |
| Faith in Action: Reflections on Constructive Resilience from Nicaragua On 29 July 2003, thousands of unemployed farmworkers and their families who had been evicted from coffee estates in the province of Matagalpa, Nicaragua, joined a peaceful march. “The March of the Hungry,” as they named their public demonstration, was not hyperbole. In 2001, global coffee prices had plummeted to record lows, leaving millions of rural people without sufficient income or resources to survive. In Nicaragua, this crisis impacted some 100,000 people, most intensely, landless farmworkers. Unable to remain on plantations foreclosed upon by banks and unwilling to illegally squat, evicted farmworkers in Matagalpa built makeshift economic refugee camps which housed an estimated seven thousand people by 2003. These encampments, coordinated by homeless families themselves, lined the roads heading north. For three years, these encampments were a constant reminder of the economic devastation and mass unemployment precipitated by the coffee crisis and the inability or unwillingness of the government to respond to their most basic needs. |
| Solidarity Interrupted: Coffee, Cooperatives and Certification Conflicts in Mexico and Nicaragua Ethical commodity networks have been advanced as a means to promote cooperative development, engender more democratic forms of governance, promote environmental conservation, and redistribute a greater share of returns to farmers and workers. This essay draws upon long-term ethnographic research on the role of solidarity within two Mesoamerican coffee-producing cooperatives to understand the effects of certification regimes that undergird many ethical commodity networks today. The essay uses a labor-centric conception of solidarity to demonstrate that the pressures and demands created by certifications intended to generate more just outcomes can also strain existing solidarities that bind cooperatives together. |
| Breaking the Chains: Coffee, Crisis, and Farmworker Struggle in Nicaragua In the early 2000s the coffee crisis emerged as a central object of study for commodity chain scholars. In this paper I revisit the scene of the coffee crisis in Nicaragua to understand violent processes of devaluation and disinvestment that devastated the countryside for more than five years (2000–05). Employing a commodity disarticulations approach, I argue that conventional explanations of the coffee crisis as one of overproduction and devaluation generally failed to unravel the layered spatiality of dispossession that enables coffee chain formations. Digging below the surface text of the crisis narrative, I illustrate how the coffee crisis in the central highlands was exacerbated by an aggressive land grab by a consortium of agroindustrial capitalists called CONSAGRA-AGRESAMI that had dispossessed farmworkers of land rights and accumulated the spoils of the Sandinista-led agrarian reform over the previous decade. When CONSAGRA-AGRESAMI folded in 2000, an unemployed farmworkers movement surged to reclaim land promised to farmworkers in the popular revolution. Using this alternative reading of the crisis in Nicaragua, I aim to bring into focus the ongoing processes of dispossession that render coffee workers vulnerable to hunger, exploitation, and abuse. |
| Solidarity™: Student Activism, Affective Labor, and the Fair Trade Campaign in the United States Ethical labeling campaigns have become a central means for diffusing and negotiating conflicts between social movements and market actors. Fair Trade was a pioneering ethical label and, by many accounts, a success. For nearly a decade, United Students for Fair Trade (USFT) activists worked to build the reputation of the Fair Trade Certified (FTC) label, but in Fall 2011 they withdrew their support and urged ethical consumers to do the same. This paper is an urgent reflection on USFT's trajectory from guerrilla marketing to boycotting FTC products. While their actions may appear shortsighted and contradictory, their decision to withdraw support from the FTC label has roots in a long struggle for control of Fair Trade. We argue that their actions signal a new stage in consumer action, as activists lose faith in the legitimacy of ethical labels and instead target the agencies that own the ethical brandscape. |