Working as a non-indigenous scholar in colonised farming worlds requires facing up to some important challenges to both our scholarly approaches as well as our personal positioning as academics.

In this talk, Hugh Campbell tells his own story about investigating the colonial history of Aotearoa New Zealand through a re-examination of the history of his own family’s colonial farms. Through this journey of discovery, a different story began to emerge about the role that farms, and agricultural science, played in erasing indigenous cultures and landscapes and replacing them with modernist ontologies of progress, science, and economic rationalities.

Once we start to see our invisible colonial histories, we can start to see how indigenous voices and approaches provide the solution to many of the most critical problems facing modernist farming in colonised countries like Aotearoa New Zealand.

About the speaker

Hugh Campbell is Professor of Sociology at the University of Otago and has been involved with the Centre for Sustainability since 2001. His research focuses on issues concerning agriculture, food and environment and his recent book Farming Inside Invisible Worlds: Modernist Agriculture and its Consequences examined the role of farming in the colonisation of Aotearoa New Zealand and the long legacies of colonial dynamics in contemporary challenges around farming environments and farm politics.

Zoom link

https://otago.zoom.us/j/97964601170?pwd=UCt2U2pWQk9EUnNHc2tJaXc0ZlBxUT09

Meeting ID: 979 6460 1170
Password: 532120