Intraface: Negotiating Gender-Relations in Agrobiodiversity

Abstract

The diversity of plants and animals in agriculture is a social-ecological artefact per se and the result of long-term interaction between humans and agrobiodiversity, displaying the material resistance of the latter. The conceptual framework intraface aims at the analysis of the gendered organization of varieties in an inter-and transdisciplinary research setting. The "negotiations at the intraface" contribute to synthesizing disciplinary perspectives and life-worldly knowledge with a focus on sustainability outcomes with special emphasis on gendered power and interests. The eminent loss of agrobiodiversity requires transdisciplinary knowledge integration for sustainable transformation. The procedure of intraface analysis is illustrated on the case of paddy-rice diversity in Kerala, South India.

Introduction to the symposium on feminist perspectives on human–nature relations

“…Selfdeclared traditional male farmers and clandestine female innovators are actively involved in the co-production of knowledge when presenting and commenting on preliminary results from their own perspectives. In fact, a cyclical development of terminology is initiated through the mutual influence of empirical actualities on pre-existing definitions, the latter's further refinement according to evidence, followed again by their renewed application as transdisciplinary categories (Padmanabhan 2016).…”