PhD Project
The Negotiation of Displacement and Emplacement at Contested Agrarian Frontiers: (Im)mobility, Resistance and Acquiescence in Paraguay
The project asks how Paraguayan peasants defend their livelihoods and negotiate collective visions of a better future while facing a dual crisis. On the one hand, an increasing concentration of land under the control of export-oriented agribusinesses and the reduction of state support are leading to a crisis of small-scale agriculture. While a part of the rural population remains in place, adapts to shrinking possibilities of social and economic reproduction, resists, or waits, others seek their future in regional centres and neighbouring countries, in Europe and especially Argentina. Here, however, the lives of Paraguayan migrants are shaken by a second crisis. Ever worsening exchange rates prevent remittances and rising inflation calls into question the security and hope of the new "home". Displaced by economic crisis and discrimination, many migrants return to their communities of origin.
A multi sited field research explores the translocal lifeworlds that stretch out between three rural communities and three urban destinations in Paraguay and Argentina, reconstructing how peasants and migrants cope with contemporary crisis and attempt to shape social change. The analysis shows that they are continuously torn between leaving and staying, renegotiating their aspirations and hopes in face of new fears and periods of uncertain waiting. As they navigate between alternative places and strategies, they weave together mobile and seemingly immobile courses of action. This dissertation uses the conceptual pair of displacement and emplacement, first, to describe the gradual, cumulative process of displacement in rural areas and urban destinations (displacement) and, second, to explore how actors use and expand their room for manoeuvre to create places to which they can attach their hopes for a better life (emplacement).
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Eva Gerharz (RUB) & Prof. Dr. Heike Greschke (TU Dresden)