From the Ground Up: Social History, Land Quality and Inequality in Southwestern Niger
Matthew Turner
Professor
Geography
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Time and Location
12:00pm, 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI
Download Poster (pdf)
Description
This presentation will revisit the debate about the production of inequality within West African villages. Through a spatially-explicit social history of village settlement, the persistent effects of this history on the distribution of land control (quantity and quality) will be analyzed for several villages in southwestern Niger. Variation in land quality is shown to be an important mediator between the past and present with important implications for how we think about rural inequality and food insecurity.
Bio
Matthew Turner has worked within francophone West Africa since 1987 on a wide range of projects concerned with the relationship between political-economic and ecological change.