Critical Agrarian Studies
Social Scientists’ Association (SSA) has a deep legacy of creating debate and discussion on agrarian change in Sri Lanka since the 1980s. SSA’s groundbreaking research on agrarian studies that resulted in an edited volume entitled Capital and Peasant Production: Studies in the continuity and discontinuity of Agrarian Structures in Sri Lanka (1985), continues to be cited to-date by political economists working on Sri Lanka. With a view to encourage research on agrarian studies, adding to this tradition, in 2023, SSA initiated a monthly discussion series on contemporary agrarian political economy to reflect critically on agrarian change in the country.
The seminars are critical of the dominant paradigm in agrarian studies that is often times echoed in donor agendas and institutional structures, and seek to shed light on the temporal construction, reproduction and transformation of agrarian structures, institutions and social classes. It places emphasis on intellectual traditions that highlight the voices of the exploited and oppressed social classes with a view to not only understand the world but also to transform it. The series attempts to be inclusive of diverse formats of knowledge generation, attribution, circulation, exchange and use.
Watch the Latest Talk
21 April 2025
Transnational Foundations: Women Migrant Domestic Workers Building ‘Modern’ Homes and Challenging Gender and Social Hierarchies in Nelibewa, Sri Lanka
Kaushalya Herath
04 December 2024
Agrarian Crisis in the Age of Inequality
P. Sainath
09 September 2024
Health Impacts of Financial Hardship and Climate Change among Agrarian Households in Sri Lanka’s Dry Zone
Gabriela Fernando
20 August 2024
Caste and Agrarian Question in Central Sri Lanka
Kalinga Tudor Silva
17 July 2024
Climate Resilient Agriculture Projects in Sri Lanka’s Dry Zone – A Feminist Political Ecology Analysis
Nethmi Bathige
14 June 2024
Socialist Agrarian Politics under Developmentalism: The National and Agrarian Questions in Punjab, Pakistan after Partition
Hashim bin Rashid
21 May 2024
Capital and Patriarchy in Sri Lanka’s Rice Economy
Dhanusha Gihan Pathirana
24 April 2024
Pul Eliya: A Village in Sri Lanka in Times of Change – a Perspective from the Hydro – Social Sciences
Sjoerd Pieters
13 March 2024
James Brow, Anuradhapura 1984, and the Question of Agrarian Change
Jonathan Spencer FBA
21 February 2024
Irrigation Management and Structural Disempowerment of Farmers in Rural Sri Lanka
Vidura Munasinghe
30 January 2024
Understanding Land Rights through Collective Farmer Struggles
Natasha Van-Hoff
30 November 2023
Role of Women Farmers in Upholding Food Security in Sri Lanka
Rashmini De Silva and Chathurika Sewwandi
25 October 2023
Agrarian Climate Politics: The Political Ecology of Climate and Agrarian Change in Sri Lanka’s north-central Dry Zone
Harry Quealy
20 September 2023
‘Pig Earth’ in Lanka
Kanya D’Almeida, Shanil Ratnaike and Quincy Saul
18 August 2023
Peasant Politics’ and the War in Sri Lanka
Benedikt Korf
06 July 2023
Understanding Women’s Labour in Agriculture: Exploring Unpaid Family Work
Buddhima Padmasiri
10 May 2023
The Rural, Engineering and Nationalism: The Case of the Accelerated Mahaweli Development Project
Dileepa Witharana
07 April 2023
The Agrarian Basis of Resistance to Dispossession
Devaka Gunawardena
15 March 2023
Is the Agrarian Question Dead? Theory, Tendencies and Praxis
Kalpa Rajapaksha
09 February 2023
Progressive policies and the state’s local practices: some thoughts on rural contexts in Sri Lanka
Urs Geiser