On 28 February 2019, Clara Mi Young Park successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled Gender, Generation and Agrarian Change: Cases from Myanmar and Cambodia.
In her thesis, Clara Park considers the transformations to rural communities, physical landscapes and social relations in Southeast Asia that have been bought about by the global land rush. Looking at Cambodia and Myanmar in particular, she contends that the climate change agenda has created the conditions to justify land grabs in the name of the environmental good, so-called 'green grabs'.
Centering gender and generations into the politics of land grabs
She contends that this body of work is slowly beginning to integrate gender and generation into the analysis of agrarian and environmental transformations, bringing in a more nuanced understanding of the impacts of land grabs.
She argues, however, that much of this literature still assumes that 'local people'
and 'local communities' are homogenous groups, an assumption that has both analytical and political implications.
Building on feminist political economy and ecology, her thesis provides an analysis of gendered and 'generational' patterns of rural dispossession, incorporation and political reactions from below with empirical evidence from Cambodia and Myanmar.
Photos and video of the defence
