“Selections from Village Notebooks: Farmers, Workers, and Everyday Life in Northern Mozambique and Central Ethiopia”
Brad Paul
Independent Consultant; Associate Scientist, Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems
University of Wisconsin – Madison
Time and Location
12:00pm, 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI
Description
Brad will discuss his “Field Diary” research in rural Mozambique and Ethiopia. Field Diaries are daily journals, recorded by village residents in such settings as cashew factories, plantation forestry nurseries, barley cooperatives, and community maize mills. They provide useful information about habits, customs, recreation, work and social life of farmers, workers, managers, and community members alike. This research seeks to contribute to critical thinking about international development and suggest new ways we might measure and understand social and economic change.
Bio
Brad Paul is an Associate Scientist with the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems (CIAS) and a Visiting Scholar with the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology at UW-Madison. Dr. Paul is a historian and ethnographer who brings close to twenty years of experience directing policy and research agendas related to rural and industrial development, labor, housing, and poverty reduction. Internationally, his research has focused on work culture and the impact of private and public sector investment on community development. On domestic matters, his writings on housing, homelessness, and labor have appeared in such publications as Clearinghouse Review, Ms. Magazine, Shelter Force, and the Encyclopedia of U.S. Labor and Working Class History. Brad earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where his research centered on 19th and 20th Century U.S. labor and comparative labor and industrialization in the American South and South Africa.