Topic:Agrarian reform in South Africa:a pragmatic proposal

Speaker:BenCousins——Senior Professor at University of the Western Cape, South Africa(the former Director of PLAAS, School of Government)

Date: November21, 2016, 16:00-18:00 (Monday)

Venue:North Auditorium of Xiushan Activity Center, North Campus of Northwest A&F University, Yangling, Shaanxi, 712100

Language: English (with bilingual slides)

Contact:RuiLi, 18829352158, angela12321@163.com

Short-bio of the speaker:

Prof. Cousins was born in 1949，in Johannesburg, South Africa. He gained his PhD in applied social science from the University of Zimbabwe (1997). He was in exile for 19 years (1972-1991), working in agricultural training and extension in Swaziland (1976-1983) and Zimbabwe (1983-1986), and carried out research on communal grazing, livestock production and rural class formation in Zimbabwe (1986-1991). From 1991 to 1995, he lectured in Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape and held a chair in Development Management at the University of the Western Cape from 1998 to 2009. He founded and directed the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS)from its inception in 1995 until September 2009. His main research interests are the politics of land and agrarian reform, agrarian change and agro-food regimes, land tenure reform, livestock production and common property resources, and the political economy of rural development. He has published widely in both academic and non-academic formats and edited or co-edited 5 books on these topics. He is also in the international advisory board of Journal of Agrarian Change from 2008 and also a reviewer for some leading international journals such as World Development, Journal of Agrarian Change, Journal of Peasant Studies, Land Use Policy and Development Southern Africa. He is currently rated by South Africa’s National Research Foundation as a researcher ‘who enjoys considerable international recognition for the high quality and impact of his recent research outputs’, and he was awarded a DST/NRF Research Chair in 2009.