Wendy Wolford

About

Wendy Wolford is the Robert A. and Ruth E. Polson Professor of Global Development in the Department of Global Development in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Since 2018, Wolford has served as the university’s vice provost for international affairs. 

Wolford is an expert on land distribution, use, and governance around the world. She has worked for many years in Brazil and, more recently, in Ecuador and Mozambique, collaborating with local researchers, community members, policymakers, and multilateral organizations. Wendy has published several books, including This Land is Ours Now, about the Brazilian social movement, the Rural Landless Workers (Duke University Press, 2010) and a co-edited volume, The Social Lives of Land(Cornell University Press, 2024). Her most recent book, The Elusive Plantation, is currently under review. Wolford was a fellow in the Yale Agrarian Studies Program in 2004–05 and a Fulbright Research Scholar in 2016–17 and has received support from the National Science Foundation, Mellon, Ford, the Social Science Research Council, and more.

As vice provost for international affairs, Wolford supports the university’s international community and focuses on strengthening the university’s many global connections and interdisciplinary initiatives. Under her leadership, the university has created the Global Hubs partnerships, Global Grand Challenges, and increased support for Scholars Under Threat. 

Research Focus

Wendy's work draws upon and contributes to political economies of development, social movements and resistance, agrarian societies, political ecology, land use, land reform, and critical ethnography, all with a regional concentration in Latin America, particularly Brazil. For over fifteen years, she has worked with one of the most exciting and important grassroots social movements in Latin American history, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (the Movement of Rural Landless Workers, or the MST). From her work with the movement, she has developed the following projects: 1) an analysis of the historical relationships between land and labor that shape movement formation and maintenance in two distinct regions of Brazil: the relatively more developed South and the impoverished sugarcane region of the Northeast; 2) an ethnographic analysis of institutional culture, governance and land distribution in Brazil with a focus on the ways in which the politics of nostalgia, regret, solidarity and opposition shape the speed, nature and feasibility of land reform; 3) a critical evaluation of "participatory democracy " in the increasing articulations between the state and social movements in Latin America; and 4) an analysis of the shifting paradigms of farmer-led conservation and development in the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador. 

Outreach and Extension Focus

Wendy directed an online multimedia Conservation Bridge case study profiling the CARE-WWF Alliance for Sustainable and Just Food Systems including an 18-minute video and accompanying written case study, now freely available online for educators worldwide. She returned to Mozambique in 2016 to screen and discuss the case study video with the community members featured.

In collaboration with a grade school teacher in Chapel Hill, NC, Wendy has developed a two-week curriculum unit for the sixth grade on "rural development and citizenship in Brazil." The unit covers the historical roots of landlessness and rural inequality in Brazil as well as the relationship between movements like the MST, property rights, and effective versus formal citizenship. Please see her research page to download this curriculum and use it in your own classroom.

Teaching Focus

One of Wendy's main inspirations is in teaching and working with undergraduate and graduate students. She is particularly interested in bringing research together with teaching, and to that end she encourages students to think critically about everything they read, write and experience. Wendy teaches courses in Development Theory at the undergraduate level and Development Theory, Qualitative Methods, Political Ecology, and Social Movements at the graduate level.

Selected Publications

Books

• Under review. The Elusive Plantation: Research, Extension, and Community Development in Rural Mozambique. University of California Press, submitted January 2024.
• 2024. Social Lives of Land, edited by Michael Goldman, Nancy Peluso and Wendy Wolford. Cornell University Press, forthcoming Fall 2024.

Journal Publications

• In review. “For a Critical Geography of the Plantationocene” for a special forum in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, revise and resubmit.
• In review. “Global Land Deals: What has been done, what has changed, and what’s next?” Wendy Wolford, Ben White, Ian Scoones, Ruth Hall, Marc Edelman, and Saturnino M. Borras Jr. Submitted to the Journal of Peasant Studies, December 2023.
• 2023. Chao, Sophie, Wendy Wolford, Andrew Ofstehage, Shalmali Guttal, Euclides Gonçalves, Euclydes and Fernanda Ayala. “The Plantationocene as analytical concept: a forum for dialogue and reflection,” The Journal of Peasant Studies. Online, 23 pages. 
• Wolford, Wendy, 2021 “The Plantationocene: A Lusotropical Contribution to the Theory,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, early view online.
• Scoones, I., Edelman, M., Borras , S., Hall, R., Wolford, W. W., & White, B. (2018). Emancipatory rural politics: confronting authoritarian populism. The Journal of Peasant Studies. 45:1-20.

Special Issues (Editorial Role)

• In review. Special Forum on the Plantationocene in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, ten contributions.
• In review. Special issue on the Plantationocene and Agrarian Studies in the Journal of Peasant Studies.

Book Chapters

• 2024. “State, Citizenship and Land,” Andrew Ofstehage and Wendy Wolford in Political Economy of Land and Labor, edited by Saturnino (Jun) Borras Jr. and Jennifer C. Franco, Oxford University Press.
• 2024. The Making of Mozambique: A short history of manioc in colonial and postcolonial development, in Social Lives of Land, edited by Michael Goldman, Nancy Peluso and Wendy Wolford. Cornell University Press, expected 2023