Our research aims to better understand the intricate relationships of violence and care involved in the connected processes of extraction, production, and exchange of commodities marked as new sustainable products and green living forms.
We ground the research project on three commodities: date palms, natural fibres and digital platforms. Date palms and natural fibres, such as bamboo and sisal, are examples of commodity frontiers that have re-emerged as responses to reducing plastic use, shifting to functional ‘superfoods,’ and creating sustainable solutions using digital platforms. Yet, both sisal and date palm have thousands of years of relational history in people’s everyday lives with cultural, symbolic and political significance.
Photo: Marjaana JauholaHistories of these commodities are embedded with colonial expansion, racialization and drastic ecological changes in tropical rural landscapes. Similarly, expansion and proliferation of digital platforms fundamentally transforms global division of labour and resource extraction patterns.
Framed as sustainable solutions in green and digitalised capitalism, these contexts of commodities provide sites for studying how ‘living green’ and consumption are entangled with peoples histories, present and futures: collective and individual lives of those engaged in producing, manufacturing and consumption of such green commodities.
The project draws on and contributes to feminist peace and conflict studies, political ecology, and political economy. Our approach includes multispecies and intersectional analysis of contexts that at first sight are not considered as zones of violence.
Goal
We expand feminist peace and conflict studies into the sphere of commodity frontiers to highlight the multispecies violence of extractivist capitalism. We interrogate how commodities –date palms, natural fibres and digital platforms- -produce entanglements of violence and care. The project will offer new theoretical and empirical knowledge on the consequences and the unseen costs of ‘living green’.
We bring together three sites of commodity frontiers production network: the farmer, value-adders and commodity developers, and digital platforms in the online marketplace.
Funding
Funding source
Research Council of Finland 2023-2027
Co-operators
Advisory Board
Rosalba Icaza, Professor in Global Politics, Feminisms and Decoloniality, Institute of Social Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Phoebe Moore, Professor of Management and Futures of Work, Essex University, School of Business, and Senior Research Fellow, ILO
Tania Pérez-Bustos, Associate Professor in Anthropology, National University of Colombia
Shirin Rai, SOAS Distinguished Research Professor at SOAS University of London
Tiina Vaittinen, University Researcher, Tampere University
