On 5 October 2022, Zoe Brent was awarded a distinction for her PhD thesis examining the challenge of generational renewal in post-industrial farming contexts. She focused particularly on regimes of social reproduction in the Basque Country.
In her presentation, Zoe argued that in much of the global North, the continued decline in agrarian jobs and depopulation of rural areas is increasingly discussed by policymakers and the media as a crisis of generational renewal, which affects the majority of the European region (especially the west) and also the future of the food system.
She argued that this crisis of generational renewal is actually a symptom of broader ecological and political crises, as well as a crisis of social reproduction. Emerging efforts to overcome barriers to generational renewal are framed as one among many collective mobilizations responding to ecological, political and social crises more broadly. We are living in a global moment when the need for systemic transformation in order to ensure the survival of the planet and the majority of the people living on it in increasingly evident.
Rewatch Zoe's defence introduction
Read the thesis
The full text of the thesis will shortly be available for download from the ISS Library.
In the meantime you can download the abstracts.