Facundo Martín

Facundo Martín, Argentinian CONICET researcher and professor in the Faculty of Geography at the National University of Cuyo (UNCuyo) in Mendoza, has been awarded this year's prestigious Georg Forster Research Fellowship by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. As part of the fellowship, Facundo Martín will work for several months from May 2024 at the Department of International Relations with a focus on Latin America at the University of Kassel.

Facundo Martín receives this year's fellowship for experienced researchers to study the transformation of agricultural and food systems in Germany and Argentina. For more than a decade, he has been investigating conflicts over water, land and food in western Argentina.

In his research project as part of the Georg Forster Fellowship, he will focus on understanding the construction of agroecological food systems in urban regions with regard to their spatial and socio-political challenges. "The planned research project focuses on the transformation of agroecological food systems in the Mendoza Metropolitan Area (MMA) and the Berlin-Brandenburg Metropolitan Region (BBMR) and their rural-urban interdependencies. I am interested in the question of under which spatial, political, social and institutional conditions and with which constellations of actors the agricultural and food systems can be transformed towards agroecology and sustainability," says Martín.

The project will run for fifteen months, from May 2024, in cooperation with Kristina Dietz from the University of Kassel and Barbara Göbel from the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin. The originality of the project lies in analyzing processes of transformations of agricultural and food systems towards sustainability through a multi-local, transdisciplinary and North-South comparative approach. The aim is to better understand how stagnation and conventionalization in the agricultural sector are caused and can be overcome. Furthermore, the innovative content of the project lies in the fact that the comparative research is being carried out by a scientist from the Global South in the Global North, as a rule it is the other way round. We hope that this will provide valuable insights for overcoming existing North-South asymmetries in global research processes.

Background:

https://www.humboldt-foundation.de/bewerben/foerderprogramme/georg-forster-forschungsstipendium