CCRI Seminar 9th May 2024 - Sania Dzalbe: Farmer’s adaptation strategies in crisis

Accompanying Slides: www.slideshare...
Sania Dzalbe is a PhD student in economic geography at Umeå University in Sweden who studies how people in rural areas adapt to crisis and adversity. Drawing from her upbringing in rural Latvia, she notes the importance of social reproduction in sustaining rural livelihoods, which often goes overlooked in traditional regional economic analysis. She argues that the concept of resilience is connected to the concept of loss, as during moments of crisis and major restructuring, societies lose not only jobs and industries but also the very mechanisms through which they shape their environment, both physically and socially. Current resilience studies in economic geography tend to disregard the role of social reproduction and the losses experienced by individuals by predominantly focusing on firms and economic production. However, to understand the evolution of rural regions and communities amid various challenges they face, one must recognize that social reproduction cannot be separated from economic and knowledge production processes.