UC Berkeley

The following chapters are the culminating product of a sustained investigation into the entangled relationships between humans and land in the context of global capitalism. Looking specifically at the role of ideas in contests over territory, these pieces address this question via a number of different contexts: the cultivation of a chemicals-based understanding of soils to accompany the spatial expansion of industrial agriculture; new formulations of race in Latin America in relation to anti-imperialist land claims; emergent “land epistemologies” in revolutionary Mexico; and the National Federal of Colombian Coffee Growers' simultaneous investigations of coffee soils and coffee growers in a new science of the nation's biggest export sector. Together, these stories form a meditation on the ways that struggles between social actors for access to land are also about changing relationships between human and non-humans, between society and nature. They also address a foundational geographic theme- the social production of space- with particular attention to the critical role of the production of knowledge in that process.