Stockholms universitet

Matilda BaraibarForskare

Om mig

Jag är docent i ekonomisk historia, och min forskning behandlar globalisering, handel och (o)hållbarhet, med fokus på jordbruksomvandling och matsäkerhet. 

En aktuell publikation är The Soybean through World History: Lessons for Sustainable Food Systems (Routledge, 2023). Denna bok är en världshistorisk exposé genom sojabönans lins - utifrån sojans skiftande roller och funktioner i världshistorien (från matgröda i antikens Kina till huvudsaklig motor bakom dagens skogsskövling i Amazonas) analyseras framväxten av det moderna internationella jordbruks- och livsmedelssystemet. Boken är tvärvetenskaplig och samförfattad med Lisa Deutsch (Stockholm Resilience Center, SU). Se: https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2024-01-22-soy-a-world-journey-from-success-to-uncertainty.html 

En annan viktig publikation är min egenförfattade monografi The Political Economy of Agrarian Change in Latin America: Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay (Springer, Palgrave, 2020). Boken är en historiskt informerad komparativ studie som bl.a. diskuterar staternas manöverutryme under den allt mer intensiva jordbruksglobaliseringen.    

Utöver forskning, har jag nyligen arbetat med en rapport om 'governance' och agroekologi på uppdrag av latinamerikasektionen av FN:s livsmedelsorgan FAO. Jag ingår i den rådgivande styrelsen av det tvärvetenskapliga forskningsnätverket South American Institute for Resilience and Sustainability Studies (SARAS). Jag deltar även i det tvärvetenskapliga forskar nätverket "Alimentación y Bienestar", som kan översättas till "mat och välfärd", där vi undersöker olika aspekter på produktion och konsumtion av livsmedel.

Jag är även en erfaren universitetslärare. Jag har stolt emottagit Stockholms Universitets pedagogiska pris för 2021,  ”Årets Lärare”.  Utöver kurser, har jag bred erfarenhet av handledning (16 C-uppsatser och 18 masteruppsatser). Jag är huvudhandledare för Enrique Mejía, doktorand i ekonomisk historia. Jag var biträdande handledare för Jorge Rodriguez Morales, som disputerade i internationella relationer i december 2023.

Jag har i dagsläget forskningsfinansiering från Vetenskapsrådet (projektnummer 2018-02051) och Jan Wallanders och Tom Hedelius stiftelse samt Tore Browaldhs stiftelse (projektnummer P20-0258). Jag är forskningsledare för det sistnämnda projektet, och där ingår även min doktorand Enrique Mejia.

 

  

Undervisning

Matilda Baraibar utsedd till årets lärare för sitt studentengagemang

En av 2021 års pristagare av årets pedagogiska pris vid Stockholms universitet är Matilda Baraibar, Institutionen för ekonomisk historia och internationella relationer vid Samhällsvetenskapliga fakulteten.

Matilda Baraibar, doktor i ekonomisk historia, vid Institutionen för ekonomisk historia och internationella relationer är en av fem pristagare i utdelningen av det pedagogiska priset Årets lärare vid Stockholms universitet.

Matilda Baraibar, vinnare av årets pedagogiska pris. Foto: Gonzalo Pozo

– Meddelandet om att jag tilldelats det pedagogiska priset gjorde mig oerhört glad och överraskad. Jag hade precis reflekterat över hur tidskrävande och svårt det kan vara att ge tydlig ´feedback’ till alla studentinlämningar så här i slutet av terminen. Priset gav en påminnelse om hur viktigt det arbetet är, säger Matilda Baraibar.

Priset delas ut varje år vid Stockholms universitet till en till fem pedagogiskt skickliga lärare. Studenter och personal kan nominera lärare och kollegor som anses göra framstående pedagogiska insatser. 

– Jag känner mig väldigt rörd och tacksam över att någon eller några av ’mina’ studenter uppenbarligen lagt ner en hel del engagemang i att nominera mig till denna vackra utmärkelse. Samtidigt vill jag passa på att säga jag vet många utmärkta kollegor som lägger ner hårt arbete i undervisningen och som också förtjänar detta pris, menar Matilda Baraibar.

Vad tänker du om undervisningen efter att du fått den här utmärkelsen?

– Priset ger mig förnyad kraft att försöka bli ännu bättre på att utveckla varje enskild students akademiska tänkande och skrivande.

Ytterligare fyra lärare vid universitetet utnämndes till årets läare. Samtliga tilldelas en prissumma på 50 000 kronor var, vilket ska ge möjliget till lärarna att utveckla sig ytterligare inom sitt respektive område. Läs mer om årets pristagare och motiveringar

Motiveringen

Matilda Baraibar vid Institutionen för ekonomisk historia och internationella relationer utses till Årets lärare 2021 för sin förmåga att stödja studenters akademiska skrivande där hon stimulerar studenterna att bli analytiska och kritiskt tänkande. Genom att möta studenterna på deras nivå och uppmärksamma deras styrkor i textutkast till uppsatser lyckas hon stärka deras akademiska självförtroende. Hon ger studenterna väl genomtänkta uppgifter och utmanar dem till att anlägga nya perspektiv på det de tagit för givet, samtidigt som de får möjlighet att se hur tidigare kurser vid andra institutioner kan bidra till deras förståelse för ämnet. Matilda Baraibar har också rönt stor uppskattning för det sätt på vilket hon har hjälpt sina kollegor att anpassa och utveckla sin undervisning vid övergången till undervisning online.

Forskningsprojekt

Publikationer

I urval från Stockholms universitets publikationsdatabas

  • The Political Economy of Agrarian Change in Latin America

    2020. Matilda Baraibar Norberg.

    Bok

    This book makes an original contribution to the discussion about agro-food exporting countries’ governmental policy. It presents a historicized and internationally contextualized exploration of the political economy of agrarian change in three Latin American countries: Argentina, Praguay, and Uruguay. By comparatively examining how these states have acted in a context of global driven market forces and historically formed institutions, the monograph illuminates the differing capacities of state autonomy under the present era of globalized agriculture.

    Läs mer om The Political Economy of Agrarian Change in Latin America
  • Toward understanding the dynamics of land change in Latin America

    2019. Juan C. Rocha (et al.). Ecology & society 24 (1)

    Artikel

    Climate change, financial shocks, and fluctuations in international trade are some of the reasons why resilience is increasingly invoked in discussions about land-use policy. However, resilience assessments come with the challenge of operationalization, upscaling their conclusions while considering the context-specific nature of land-use dynamics and the common lack of long-term data. We revisit the approach of system archetypes for identifying resilience surrogates and apply it to land-use systems using seven case studies spread across Latin America. The approach relies on expert knowledge and literature-based characterizations of key processes and patterns of land-use change synthesized in a data template. These narrative accounts are then used to guide development of causal networks, from which potential surrogates for resilience are identified. This initial test of the method shows that deforestation, international trade, technological improvements, and conservation initiatives are key drivers of land-use change, and that rural migration, leasing and land pricing, conflicts in property rights, and international spillovers are common causal pathways that underlie land-use transitions. Our study demonstrates how archetypes can help to differentiate what is generic from context dependant. They help identify common causal pathways and leverage points across cases to further elucidate how policies work and where, as well as what policy lessons might transfer across heterogeneous settings.

    Läs mer om Toward understanding the dynamics of land change in Latin America
  • Experimentation in the Design of Public Policies

    2020. Cristina Zurbriggen (et al.). Ibero-Americana, Nordic Journal of Latin American Studies 49 (1), 52-62

    Artikel

    Agricultural intensification in Latin America has led to accelerated soil erosion, water pollution and food with pesticide residues, which are all signs of unsustainable development. In Uruguay, agricultural intensification with continuous cropping has threatened the country’s primary natural resource: its soil. At the same time, incentives for further intensification and specialization are high, since particularly soybeans have offered the highest (short-term) economic margins. This paper aims to contribute to the discussion about governance for sustainable development through an in-depth critical examination of the main flagship public policy response in Uruguay to soil degradation: the Soils Use and Management Plans (SUMP). SUMP indeed has managed to change cultivation practices in a more sustainable direction. The analysis shows that the relative success of SUMP is partly due to its experimental policy design which has allowed for collective knowledge construction and reflexive learning. It also shows that Uruguay’s long history of accumulated domestic soil expertise and state intervention rendered trust in the regulative process among producers and ultimately a high degree of acceptance. Nevertheless, while this policy is found innovative and promising, there is still a need for improvement of governance designs, if genuinely sustainable development is to be achieved.

    Läs mer om Experimentation in the Design of Public Policies
  • Green Deserts or New Opportunities?

    2014. Matilda Baraibar.

    Avhandling (Dok)

    In just over a decade, soybean production in Uruguay emerged from almost non-existence to second most important export product. The extraordinary rapid soybean expansion is often referred to as representing changes that go far beyond the mere substitution of one agrarian activity for another, but evolved into a broad societal concern. Accordingly, the soybean expansion has not only been debated in national media, but among NGO’s, firms, scholars, farmers, political parties as well as within broad sectors of the state apparatus. Although the views expressed are allegedly about the soybean expansion, they are found to reflect much deeper values and assumptions about what is good, appropriate and desirable. All this ultimately represents discordant alternative visions and paths of development. This dissertation outlines and analyzes the dynamics of different, complementary and competing views on the soybean expansion in Uruguay between 2002 and 2013. These have in turn been related to wider debates about “development” of longer historical roots within the social sciences.

    Rather than exclusively relying on the mediatized accounts expressed in the public debate, often posed in a rather superficial and antagonistic way in accordance to some media logic, this study has made intensive use of in-depth interviews. This has allowed for deeper, more complex and nuanced accounts, as well as made possible to include voices that were only indirectly “represented” in the public debate. The main agreements and disagreements expressed in relation to the soybean expansion have been outlined, described, situated and explored. While constant contingency and unfixity are acknowledged, three main broader competing world-views, or discourses, have also been identified. These are discerned through the analysis of patterns of regularities in the articulations about the soybean expansion. The first is labelled “agro-ecology discourse”, reflecting anti-capitalist notions and centered in values of local autonomy and justice. The other is labelled “pro-market discourse”, reflecting market faith and centered in values of growth, dynamism and meritocracy. The third is labelled “pro-public regulation discourse”, reflecting beliefs in development intervention and centered in values of progress and upgrading.

    Läs mer om Green Deserts or New Opportunities?
  • Food systems transformations in South America: Insights from a transdisciplinary process rooted in Uruguay

    2022. Silvana Juri (et al.). Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 6

    Artikel

    The wicked nature of sustainability challenges facing food systems demands intentional and synergistic actions at multiple scales and sectors. The Southern Cone of Latin America, with its historical legacy of “feeding the world,” presents interesting opportunities for generating insights into potential trajectories and processes for food system transformation. To foster such changes would require the development of collective understanding and agency to effectively realize purposeful and well-informed action toward desirable and sustainable food futures. This in turn demands the transdisciplinary engagement of academia, the private sector, government/policy-makers, community groups, and other institutions, as well as the broader society as food consumers. While the need for contextualized knowledge, priorities and definitions of what sustainable food systems change means is recognized, there is limited literature reporting these differences and critically reflecting on the role of knowledge brokers in knowledge co-production processes. The political nature of these issues requires arenas for dialogue and learning that are cross-sectoral and transcend knowledge generation. This paper presents a case study developed by SARAS Institute, a bridging organization based in Uruguay. This international community of practice co-designed a 3-year multi-stakeholder transdisciplinary process entitled “Knowledges on the Table.” We describe how the process was designed, structured, and facilitated around three phases, two analytical levels and through principles of knowledge co-production. The case study and its insights offer a model that could be useful to inform similar processes led by transdisciplinary communities of practice or bridging institutions in the early stages of transformative work. In itself, it also represents a unique approach to generate a language of collaboration, dialogue, and imagination informed by design skills and methods. While this is part of a longer-term process toward capitalizing on still-unfolding insights and coalitions, we hope that this example helps inspire similar initiatives to imagine, support, and realize contextualized sustainable food system transformations.

    Läs mer om Food systems transformations in South America
  • The Soybean Through World History: Lessons for Sustainable Agrofood Systems

    2023. Matilda Baraibar, Lisa Deutsch.

    Bok

    This book examines the changing roles and functions of the soybean throughout world history and discusses how this reflects the complex processes of agrofood globalization.

    The book uses a historical lens to analyze the processes and features that brought us to the current global configuration of the soybean commodity chain. From its origins as a peasant food in ancient China, today the protein-rich soybean is by far the most cultivated biotech crop on Earth; used to make a huge variety of food and industrial products, including animal feed, tofu, cooking oil, soy sauce, biodiesel and soap. While there is a burgeoning amount of literature on how the contemporary global soy web affects large tracts of our planet’s social-ecological systems, little attention has been given to the questions of how we got here and what alternative roles the soybean has played in the past. This book fills this gap and demonstrates that it is impossible to properly comprehend the contemporary global soybean chain, or the wider agrofood system of which it is a part, without looking at both their long and short historical development. However, a history of the soybean and its changing roles within equally changing agrofood systems is inexorably a history about globalization. Not only does this book map out where soybeans are produced, but also who governs, wields power and accumulates capital in the entire commodity chain from inputs in production to consumption, as well as identifying the institutional context the global commodity chain operates within. The book concludes with a discussion of the main challenges and contradictions of the current soy regime that could trigger its rupture and end.

    This book is essential reading for students, practitioners and scholars interested in agriculture and food systems, global commodity chains, globalization, environmental history, economic history and social-ecological systems.

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  • Sojización as a New First Movement:: A Polanyian Analysis of the South American Soybean ‘Boom'

    2022. Matilda Baraibar. The Age of the Soybean: , 91-114

    Kapitel

    South America – specifically Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia and Uruguay – has become an increasingly specialised world provider of soybeans. Indeed, over the last two decades, more than 33 million additional hectares of land (roughly a surface area equivalent to that of Vietnam, or to all the arable surface of Ukraine) have been incorporated into soybean production. This land-use change, here referred to as sojización, has brought multiple consequences, ranging from deforestation, soil degradation and water pollution to agribusiness domination, displacement of family farmers and ‘foreignisation’ of land. While the consequences differ from one place to another, sojización has brought dramatic technological, productive and social transformations throughout the region, leading to increased land concentration and land-use intensification. The consequences of this dramatic change have rightfully received much scholarly attention. Less thoroughly addressed, however, is the preceding history that shaped the preconditions for sojización to occur. This chapter fills this gap through a deep "Polanyian" historical exploration of the multiple shifts and continuities that preceded and, indeed, made sojización possible.

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Visa alla publikationer av Matilda Baraibar vid Stockholms universitet