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Call for Papers for a Special Issue
Special issue title
Decolonizing Agriculture: Land, Seeds, and Transformative Futures in and beyond Korea
Guest editors
Ga Young Chung, University of California Davis | gachung@ucdavis.edu
Hyojeong Kim, Myungji University | sheenkimm@gmail.com
Deadline
Abstracts (maximum 500 words) due by April 15, 2026
Land and seeds are not merely resources for production and harvest; they are living repositories of knowledge, community life, and intergenerational relations. By centering land and seeds in our research, we aim to expose the violent, understudied aspects of life, labor, and gendered relations throughout modern Korean history. Narratives of “developmentalism” in the two Koreas and much of Asia have frequently depicted the exploitative utilization of land and seeds as indisputable advancement, effectively obscuring the destruction of sustainable, communitarian connections between humans and the land. Indeed, issues involving land and seeds lie at the core of broader contemporary struggles over food security, sovereignty, environmental sustainability, and gender justice.
This special issue represents a timely effort to revitalize research and practices aimed at decolonizing the oppressive systems surrounding land and seeds. To that end, we seek to rethink the violent and exploitative forces ushered in by colonization, imperialist interventions, militarization, patriarchal developmentalism, and, more recently, neoliberal restructuring in Korea and other parts of Asia. By engaging interdisciplinary work that scrutinizes domination, subordination, and inequality in and beyond Korea, we intend to highlight efforts to envision and build alternative, radical approaches. These approaches should allow communities to live in symbiosis with the land, with the ultimate goal of collectively building a liberatory future accessible to all.
We welcome submissions that utilize innovative approaches to understanding and interrogating the politics of land and seeds across varied historical and political settings in Korea and wider Asia. Submissions addressing transnational solidarity or comparative colonial agrarian policy are highly encouraged. We invite contributors from diverse disciplinary backgrounds who seek to interrogate and dismantle colonial and capitalist agricultural praxes. In addition to academic papers, we accept creative dialogues between scholars and activists, seed savers and farmers, and researchers of indigenous knowledge. These contributions may take the form of interviews, artwork, or other creative outputs.
Topics might include, but are not limited to:
Submission Guidelines
