savoy011

Moderator’s Note: We are reposting this set of close-up reflections on the 2013 Burlington Berry Workers’ Strike by a direct participant, the scholar activist Tomás Madrigal, a doctoral candidate in Chicana/o Studies at UC-Santa Barbara. Tomás is among a new generation of Chicana/o social science scholars refocusing attention on the conditions and struggles of the working class. ‘Labor studies’ in Chicana/o Studies – perhaps because the field was closely associated with the marxist ‘metanarratives’ – became a neglected research area.  Over the course of much of the 1990s and early 2000s, Chicana/o Studies shifted focus and ‘old school’ topics like unions and strikes became passé and were largely eclipsed by the postmodernist obsession with identity and subjectivity. It is refreshing to see a new generation of C/S scholars like Tomás Madrigal, Raul Garcia, Gabe Valle, Jessica Lozano, and many others return to community-based social action research in support of workers’ self-organi...

Elias Schewel/Flickr Whose science?  AGROECOLOGY & BIOTECHNOLOGY in THE FUTURE OF AGRICULTURE Devon G. Peña | Seattle, WA | November 5, 2013 A lot of naïve science has been involved in pushing this technology. David Williams, cellular biologist, UCLA Quoted in Scientific American  September 2013, p. 80   Food is the cover story of the September 2013 issue of Scientific American . The issue features a fascinating “Truth About GMOs” brief that mostly reads like an apologia to Monsanto et al. (pp. 80-85), perhaps for the proliferation of problems both scientific and political economic. The briefing uses a sardonic and hyperbolic title, “Biotechnology: Are engineered foods evil?” This obviously derisive reference targets the anti-GMO m ovement’s tendency to use cutesy semiotic code words like “Frankenfood” and “Frankenfish”. More than anything this illustrates the danger of using humor while engaged in the act of conveying scientific evidence on the environmental and...