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 create public engagement 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 (Borras 2023). 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.