Rethinking the Social Sciences with Sam Moyo

Edited by Praveen Jha, Paris Yeros , Walter Chambati

Hardcover

978-81-939269-4-9

Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2020

Language: English

(xiv + 342) 356 pages

6.25 x 9.5 inches

INR 0.00

In stock

SKU

LWB619

This book brings together renowned scholars from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas to celebrate the lifelong and seminal contribution of Professor Sam Moyo to the social sciences. Sam Moyo was a Zimbabwean scholar whose intellectual trajectory was part and parcel of the emergence of a critical scholarship from the 1970s onwards based on the realities and intellectual traditions of Africa and the Third World. His work influenced the global research agenda on diverse issues related to Africa and the South. He was a protagonist in the renewal of the pan-Africanist tradition of political economy from the 1990s onwards and actively defended the importance of research on land and agrarian questions at a time when such issues were being neglected. He went on to become a leading force in the creation of a South–South dynamic in research collaboration in the 2000s, in defence of the intellectual autonomy of the South. Professor Moyo conducted research on a wide variety of issues throughout his life, including land and agrarian questions in Africa, economic structural adjustment programmes, problems of agricultural productivity and environmental change, social movements under neoliberalism, and national questions in the South. The contributors to this book address this whole range of issues raised by Moyo, based on their own research and in the spirit of dialogue with brother Sam.

Professor Sam Moyo was born in Zimbabwe under the Rhodesian rule and received higher education in West Africa in the 1970s. He went on to study in Canada and the United Kingdom, before returning to Zimbabwe in the early 1980s. His intellectual formation was based on the pan-Africanist intellectual tradition and remained in firm solidarity with the aspirations of national liberation and development shared among the peoples of the South. Professor Moyo’s central concerns were the land and agrarian questions in Africa and the South and their relationship to national liberation and development. Yet, there was virtually no development issue that would not detain him and, in fact, he spearheaded research on a wide variety of issues, including economic structural adjustment programmes, problems of agricultural productivity and environmental change, social movements under neoliberalism, and national questions in the South. Moyo was an institution builder in Zimbabwe, Africa and across the South. Among his many achievements, he founded the African Institute for Agrarian Studies in Harare, of which he was executive director (2002–15), served as vice-president (1995–98) and president (2008–11) of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), and was founding editor-in-chief of the tri-continental periodical publication Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy (launched in 2012).

Paris Yeros

Paris Yeros is professor of international economics at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC), São Paulo, Brazil, and coordinator of the Postgraduate Program in World Political Economy. He has been visiting fellow at universities and institutes in Brazil, South Africa and Zimbabwe. He has published on land and labour relations and the agrarian and national questions in Africa, Latin America and the South. He is editor of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy.

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Praveen Jha

Praveen Jha is professor of economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning (CESP) and adjunct professor at the Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies (CISLS), School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi, India. He has been a visiting fellow at a number of universities and institutions in Germany, China, Switzerland, South Africa and Zimbabwe, and has collaborated in research programs with UN agencies, including ILO, UNICEF, UNDP and FAO. He has published widely on labour and agrarian relations, the economics of education and public finance. He is editor of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy.

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Walter Chambati

Walter Chambati is executive director of the Sam Moyo African Institute for Agrarian Studies, Harare, Zimbabwe. He received a BSc (Hons) in agricultural economics from the University of Zimbabwe, a master’s degree from the University of Witwatersrand, and a PhD from the University of South Africa. He has been Future Agriculture’s Consortium Research Fellow (2011) and visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University (2018). His research interests include land reform in Zimbabwe and rural labour relations and agricultural development in Africa. He is associate editor of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy.