2025/03/20 by Andrew Flachs, José Becerra, Fionna Fahey +1 · 1 voice · 1 citation
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development #Global Economic and Social Development #Political Economy and Marxism
paper · doi:10.1177/00307270251326606
openalex publication_date 2025/03/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02
In this paper, we describe links between skilling, the social, environmental, and didactic process by which farmers learn and adapt knowledge; and social reproduction, the work of continually creating the relations and institutions of the political economy. Skilling is always contextual: the ways that people learn on farms are shaped through the ecological possibilities of their space, the political economies in which they do agricultural work, local networks of inclusion and exclusion, and the institutions through which they work and live. Social reproduction theory considers how class is continually formed and labor differentiated. On farms, the work people do also continually creates a physical environment: the stage on which agricultural skill is performed. As such, social reproduction theory can describe not only how institutions create conditions that facilitate skilling but also how they reproduce worlds that inhibit it. This paper illustrates these connections between skill and social reproduction by examining how they intersect with the classic peasant model of agricultural decision-making, the colonial legacy of plantation agriculture, and the deskilling factory model of capitalist agriculture.