The Journal of Peasant Studies Krishna Bharadwaj and Eric Wolf Prize Jury has come to a unanimous decision to award the 2015–2016 prize to Julia Chuang for her excellent contribution ‘Urbanization through dispossession: survival and stratification in China's new townships’, which was published in Volume 42, Number 2.
The Krishna Bharadwaj and Eric Wolf Prize is awarded biennially for an outstanding paper published in The Journal of Peasant Studies (JPS) by a ‘young scholar’, defined as someone who either is a graduate student or has held a PhD degree for no more than four years when the paper is submitted to the journal. The Prize, which comes with an award of £1000, commemorates two long-standing and distinguished members of the JPS Editorial Advisory Board: the political economist Krishna Bharadwaj (1935–1992) and Eric Wolf (1923–1999). The Prize Committee consists of three members of the JPS editorial team (not including the Editor-in-Chief).
Chuang applies Arrighi’s notion of ‘accumulation without dispossession’ (AWD) to designate production relations in contemporary China, where workers are deployed in capitalist production without being separated from their familial subsistence holdings. She argues that the dynamic of this accumulative process is diametrically opposite to that of accumulation by dispossession (ABD) in the form of state-orchestrated land grabs. The opposed dynamics of these two forms of accumulation clash frontally in the arena of urban construction, which requires both inexpensive land grabbed from rural households and the cheap labour of workers whose inadequate wage earnings need to be subsidized by subsistence family farming in village holdings. The consequences of this clash include forms of neoliberal growth such as tourism development and real estate speculation, social inequality, and the survival or downward mobility of dispossessed rural households, leading to the formation of new class alignments in contemporary China. While Chuang does not attempt to elaborate the notions of ABD and AWD theoretically, the outcomes of these two interactive processes are vividly illustrated with ethnographic observations from her fieldwork.
The 2015–2016 winner of the prize is:
Julia Chuang, ‘Urbanization through dispossession: survival and stratification in China’s new townships’, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2014.990446
The past winners of the prize are:
2013–2014: Madeleine Fairbairn, ‘“Like gold with yield”: evolving intersections between farmland and finance’, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2013.873977
2011–2012: Michael Levien, ‘The land question: special economic zones and the political economy of dispossession in India’, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2012.656268
2009–2010: S. Ryan Isakson, ‘No hay ganancia en la milpa: the agrarian question, food sovereignty, and the on-farm conservation of agrobiodiversity in the Guatemalan highlands’, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066150903353876