Call for Papers: 2024 Agricultural History Society Annual Meeting - Borderlands, Marginal Spaces, and Agriculture In-Between
Deadline extended till November 1st!
Las Cruces, New Mexico
June 6-8, 2024
The 2024 meeting of the Agricultural History Society will convene near the U.S.- Mexico border in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Borders have been central to global agricultural history as contested, trespassed, flaunted, celebrated, and enforced spaces. These demarcations, whether imperial, physical, cultural, or ecological, have determined the movement of laborers, crops, livestock, insects, and knowledge throughout the world. They sit at the heart of historical debates over trade, technology, migration, and settlement. What’s more, the material realities of borderlands themselves have influenced agricultural activities within marginal, contested, and liminal spaces and ecologies. We gather for the annual meeting in Las Cruces to examine how humans have interacted with boundaries and in-between spaces in agricultural history and to engage with scholarship that might inform contemporary debates around borders. The theme encourages scholars to present research about all kinds of boundaries, edges, and fringes and to consider the role of farming and farmers in nation-making, particularly in terms of Indigenous people, the state, and agricultural policy.
The very nature of this conference theme reinforces the Agricultural History Society’s long-standing commitment to inclusive and trans-disciplinary scholarship. The program committee encourages contributions from scholars and researchers covering people, geographical regions, periods, and types of agriculture understudied in mainstream academia. And as always, we look forward to proposals for individual papers or full panel sessions related to any aspect of agricultural history, broadly defined.