Miss Carlotta Molfese

My PhD looks at the back-to-the-land movement as a radical social movement of individuals and group of people that have chosen to adopt a primarily agrarian lifestyle as a political choice, as a way to challenge and confront some of the social and ecological injustices arising from a globalized, industrial food system and a capitalist modernity. It focuses on their agricultural practices, alternative domesticities and wider networks of relations (e.g. Alternative Food Markets) to explore the ways in which theses ‘radical peasants’ resist capitalist ways of being and doing and create alternatives pathways to sustainability. However, it aims to do so by employing post-humanist theories that take the relational agency of non-human nature seriously in order to start conceptualizing practices of resistance and activism in "more-than-human" terms.

As a back-to-the-land farmer myself, the project employs a scholar-activist perspective to consider the messy and everyday realities of these bottom-up "green initiatives", and pays particular attention to the politics and ethics of more-than-human co-existence and resistance on back-to-the-land farms and associated sites.