Burning Questions
Fellowship Award Winners

Location: Mexico
Primary academic field: Human geography
Award category: PhD Student

Topics to be Addressed during the Award Period:

Creating alliances and networks against industrial food animal farms in the Americas

Map the groups and movements in Latin America that are working from different approaches to stop industrial animal agriculture and against the meat industry, including NGOs working at local, national, and regional or international level on human rights, environment, animal protection, agroecology, etc., as well as academics in Latin America.
Analyze the main narratives of these groups, their repertoire of actions, their positions regarding industrial farms, and how they turn into regional, national, and international networks of resistance.
Undertake archival research of press releases, videos, etc., as well as the use of art and performance for resistance.
Do participatory action research: Work with local groups to facilitate information exchange among different networks. Create academic and non-academic documents for the groups and networks to use.
Do a comparative case study analysis to provide evidence of the obstacles and challenges for scaling up resistance, as well as the successful actions.
Identify specific areas of possible opportunities for collective action of these diverse groups against mass meat production, and also challenges to cooperation.

Some of the Things We Really Liked when We Read the Application:

This project has exceptional practical value. Its findings and recommendations can be adopted for use right away.
It will show how NGOs' approaches to meat production and meat consumption reduction differ in myriad and significant ways. Even within environmental justice, there are different areas of focus. Tactics and strategies also differ. One cannot assume all NGOs are natural allies with a single common vision. There are potential tensions, but also opportunities for learning.