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Presence And Distribution Of Leptodactylus Guianensis Heyer And De Sa, 2011 In Colombia: Comparisons With Other Species In The L. Latrans Group., Mariela Osorno Muñoz, Doris L. Gutiérrez-Lamus, Rafael O. De Sá

Biology Faculty Publications

Leptodactylus guianensis is reported for the first time for Colombia along with a distributional map of the species. The species is the fifth species of the L. latransspecies group documented in the country. Males possess a single, conical and slightly chisel-shaped thumb spine; only three species in the group have a single thumb spine. In collections, specimens of L. guianensis are misidentified as L. macrosternum, L. latrans or L. bolivianus. We provide morphological, colouration and habitat descriptions for where the species occurs in Colombia.

Cattle As Technological Interventions: The Gender Effects Of Water Demand In Dairy Production In Uganda, Elizabeth Ransom, Carmen Bain, Harleen Bal, Natasha Shannon

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Smallholder dairy production dominates the country of Uganda, with over 90% of the national herd owned by smallholders. To reduce hunger, malnutrition, and raise families out of poverty agricultural development, interventions in Uganda have focused on increasing milk production through the introduction of improved dairy cow breeds. Development actors, such as the East Africa Dairy Development (EADD) program in Uganda, see crossbreed dairy cows as a key technological intervention for improving production. Drawing on a multi-method study (spatial analysis, surveys, and qualitative interviews) of dairy smallholders, our paper examines the gendered effects of the introduction of crossbreed dairy cows. To …

Livestock-Livelihood Linkages In Uganda: The Benefits For Women And Rural Households?, Elizabeth Ransom, Carmen Bain, Iim Halimatusa'diyah

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Livestock are an important component of rural households and gendered livelihood practices throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Widespread within the development literature is the belief in the livestock ladder, with poorer households often owning small stock and wealthier households owning large stock, with the assumption that poor households can utilize livestock to build their asset base and overtime this would allow poorer households to expand from small stock to large stock, in so doing climb the livestock ladder. There is also an assumption in the literature that women are more likely to oversee small stock. In addition, some well-known agricultural development programs …

Female Farming Systems, Elizabeth Ransom, Wynne Wright, Carmen Bain

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Female farming systems draws attention to women's (re)productive roles in agriculture, with particular attention to questions of power, equity, and empowerment. Female farming systems as an organizing concept highlights what was a surprisingly neglected field of study until the 1970s and provides insights into the gendered nature of agriculture. In the past and the present the term “farmer” presumes a male identity. Globally, women have often been marginalized from farming by denying them access to the material resources needed for success such as land, labor, and capital. Due to a variety of reasons there is a feminization of agriculture underway, …

Private Agri-Food Standards: Supply Chains And The Governance Of Standards, Elizabeth Ransom, Carmen Bain, Vaughan Higgins

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

The articles in this second special issue of the International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food on private agri-food standards consider key issues involved in the shift from government to governance within agri-food systems. The first special issue, published in February 2013, focused on ‘the contestation, hybridity and the politics of standards’ (Bain et al., 2013, p. 1). The articles in the first issue complicated our understanding of the relationship between public and private standards by examining the politics associated with their formation, implementation, and outcomes. At the same time, the first special issue drew attention to the diversity …

Private Agri-Food Standards: Contestation, Hybridity And The Politics Of Standards, Carmen Bain, Elizabeth Ransom, Vaughan Higgins

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Standards are an omnipresent yet generally taken-for-granted part of our everyday life (Higgins and Larner, 2010a; Timmermans and Epstein, 2010; Busch, 2011). Until recently, standards within the agri-food sector were typically dismissed (if thought of at all) by social scientists as rather benign, technical tools, primarily of interest to specialists concerned with facilitating markets and trade. Over the past decade, however, this assessment has changed considerably and many agri-food scholars now view standards as a useful entry point for analysing and understanding our social and material world. The degree of interest today is reflected in the fact that our call …

Le Développement Durable Comme Mode De Prévention Des Risques Energétiques : Une Approche Par Les Capacités D’Absorption. Le Cas De La Voiture Electrique Chez Renault, Sylvaine Castellano, Adnane Maâlaoui, Judith Schrempf-Stirling

Management Faculty Publications

Sustainability — a way to prevent energy-related risks — is the buzzword of the last decade. This trend demands radical rethinking on how society lives, consumes and produces. Herein, we focus on electric cars, which is the result of sustainable processes and initiatives in the car industry. The case of Renault illustrates how the firm based its sustainable strategy on its absorptive capacities.

Constructing Credibility: Using Technoscience To Legitimate Strategies In Agrifood Governance, Carmen Bain, Elizabeth Ransom, Michelle R. Worosz

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Agrifood scholars working within a political economy framework increasingly draw upon the concept of governance to analyze the regulation of global agricultural and food systems. An important limitation of this approach is that it fails to explain how governance strategies are legitimated. Drawing on three diverse cases that span three continents, our paper examines how standards makers appeal to technoscientific norms and values to establish both credibility for their standards and their authority in constructing them. These cases explore the development and implementation of a standard requiring complete elimination of a tart cherry insect pest in the United States; the …

Awareness And The Perceived Effects Of The New Livestock And Meat Industries Act Of 2006: A Case Study Of Kgatleng And Kweneng Districts, Botswana, Patrick Malope, Elizabeth Ransom

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

The objective of this study was to determine whether butchery owners in rural Botswana are aware of the New Livestock and Meat Industries Act of 2006 and their perceptions as to how it will affect their businesses. The study further sought to determine whether the present slaughter facilities were compliant with the New Act. A structured questionnaire was administered to butcheries in selected villages of Kgatleng (n=9) and Kweneng (n=4) districts to get butchery owners’ views about the New Act and how it will affect their businesses. Data was analysed using frequencies.

The study found that the majority (77%) of …

The Rise Of Agricultural Animal Welfare Standards As Understood Through A Neo-Institutional Lens, Elizabeth Ransom

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

In recent years agricultural animal welfare standards have increasingly been placed on the agenda of international, regional, and national governance bodies, as well as private agrifood organizations. Standards, long the domain of economists, are now recognized as one of the most significant emerging practices for governing food, and as such, a growing number of scholars have focused on the role that powerful actors have in setting standards and the distributional benefits of standards implementation. However, much of the existing literature relies on consumer-demand arguments for explaining the rise of animal welfare standards. This article uses sociological neo-institutionalism, specifically institutional isomorphism, …

Consumers And Citizens In The Global Agrifood System: The Cases Of New Zealand And South Africa In The Global Red Meat Chain, Keiko Tanaka, Elizabeth Ransom

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

This chapter aims to show that the process of changing rules within the capitalist market system, specifically meat safety governance reform in New Zealand and South Africa, raises profound obstacles for human agency, yet opens new spaces for conceptualizing who participates in promoting change. Agency and structure are complex concepts with dueling tensions that alter the form and substance (as Wright and Middendorf argue in their Introduction to this volume) of individual and collective action in the red meat commodity chains of these two countries. We show that, far from being monolithic, the ways in which capitalism and a changing …

The Southern Family Farm As Endangered Species: Possibilities For Survival In Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer, Suzanne W. Jones

English Faculty Publications

At the same time some southern studies scholars are positioning the U.S. South in a larger cultural, historic, and economic region that encompasses the Caribbean and Latin America, some southern environmentalist writers, such as long-time essayist and novelist Wendell Berry and activist-turned-memoirist Janisse Ray, are finding a pressing need to focus on smaller bioregions and the locatedness of the human subject. These writers believe that agribusiness and consumer ignorance are driving small farmers out of business and that clear-cutting timber and farming practices dependent on chemicals are threatening local ecosystems. Best-selling novelist Barbara Kingsolver has joined their ranks. With her …

The Efficiency Of Producing Alcohol For Energy In Brazil: Comment, Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

In a 1982 issue of this journal, Michael Barzelay and Scott R. Pearson examined the social costs and benefits of producing ethanol motor fuel in Brazil. They conclude that ethanol fuel was economically infeasible in 1981 and will remain so unless petroleum prices rise dramatically in the future. We seek first to call attention to some problems in their data and second to suggest that their analysis include broader considerations. Quite different conclusions could result.