Assembling Andalusian Agroecology: temporalities, territorialities and 'hopeful monsters'

This research is about the agroecology movement in the south of Spain and its transformations in the last four decades. In the last decade Andalusia’s role as Europe’s orchard has made it a crucial place where agroecological transitions are being proposed and disputed. In fact, is one of the nodes in Europe where the agroecology movement was established in the second half of the XX century. Something that needs to be better understood and dissected, as the political economy and the sociological configuration of the community goes against the grain in terms of what normatively is told the agroecology literature. Firstly, the usual historical subject leading agroecological transformations are the peasantry and indigenous actors that seek and struggle for their self-determination and autonomy against the (food) empire. They are the holders and generators of the biocultural processes needed to counter the agro-food regime. In the region these two historical subjectivities are not immediately present. Some might argue that this fact (their absence) can be extrapolated to the global north as a whole. If this is the case, this research then delves into the questions of who, what and how is agroecology put forward in the context of a colonized territory and subject like Andalusia is in contemporary Europe. How has the agroecology movement developed in the hinge territory that is Andalusia? The south of the north and north of the south, Andalusia is an interesting territory where to analyze and better understand the structures of coloniality expressed in the geo-politics of the global agro-corporate food regime, as it is a territory where internal colonialism shapes its political economy and ecology, and where several cultural and political expressions from both south and north coalesce. It is also an insightful place where to debunk the normative accounts that place this type of movement as either a full-fledged emancipatory project or a superfluous lifestyle politics. Therefore, this research delves into the question of how are the agroecology initiatives in Andalusia performing their prefigurative politics in their specific space-temporalities? Firstly, the dissertation will unpack and characterize the formation of different waves of agroecology in the autonomous community, analyzing the temporalities of collective action placing the attention in the generational configuration of its milieu in different waves of contention since the 1980’s. Then the narration will take the reader both literally and figuratively through the movement area landscape, providing thick descriptions of the way the different agroecology initiatives operate in their everyday life and accounting for the more-than-human agencies involved.  Finally, the dissertation will end by offering an account about the way the agroecology movement today (might) be challenging the cultural codes of the society in which it is embedded. This is, what are the cultural repositories that are used, abandoned and produced by the milieu. By focusing particularly in the web of meanings, symbolic terrains, discourses and ways of doing in which the current agroecology milieu is investing their resources, time and energies in the creation of their collective identities and social change narratives.