Seminar: The Age of Discovery: New Forms of Knowledge for Rural Development in Mozambique

Wendy Wolford is the Robert A. and Ruth E. Polson Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University. She is also the Faculty Director of Economic Development Programs in Cornell’s Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future and she co-leads a three-year project on Contested Global Landscapes at Cornell’s Institute for the Social Sciences. Her work addresses issues of resource access and use, particularly in relation to rural development, with a focus on Latin America and sub Saharan Africa. Wendy has worked with local communities, policy makers, and social movements on land reform, new relationships between agriculture and conservation, and bilateral technology transfer projects. Her work has received funding and support from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, among others. She has published numerous books and articles, including This Land is Ours Now: Social Mobilizations and the Meanings of Land in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2010), and a co-edited a volume on Governing Global Land Deals: The role of the state in the rush for land (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).