Agrarian Studies Colloquium: Anthony Dest "Liberating Mother Earth: The Conditions and Contradictions of a Free Peasantry in Cauca, Colombia"

The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.

It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms aremeaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?

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Anthony Dest is assistant professor of anthropology at Lehman College-CUNY. He is committed to supporting movements for social justice and liberation. His teaching, research, and writing explores the contours of violence and racism in Latin America. He earned his PhD in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and his bachelor’s degree in Latin American Studies and Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also holds a graduate certificate in Armed Conflict & Peace from La Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. His dissertation, After the War: Violence and Resistance in Colombia, was recognized as the Best Dissertation of 2019 by the Peace and Justice Studies Association. His research has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Inter-American Foundation, and the Fulbright Program.