Agricultural and Food History (AgriFood)
Head of department: Brigitte Semanek
The research activities of the department of Agricultural and Food History focus on the fundamental changes in the agricultural and food system – the chain of goods ‘from field to fork’ – over the course of the last two centuries.
In retrospect, this process appears as a series of discontinuities, which fundamentally transformed the socio-technical network of agriculture: changes in the use of natural resources, property relations, labour relations, forms of production and technologies were accompanied by changing meanings of agriculture in society, new knowledge regimes and institutional arrangements. From the contemporaries’ perspective, however, and embedded in their life-world contexts, this process rarely appeared as a great transformation. Rather, it was characterized by successes and crises, everyday areas of conflict and their striving for recognition and a secured livelihood.
The research programme of the department combines both perspectives: on the one hand, it examines long-term structural trends through macro-historical approaches; on the other hand, it conducts micro-historical analyses. Department researchers reconstruct the complexity of historical everyday life and the scopes of action in small-scale areas.
With the global dimension of this process in mind, our research is mostly regionally focused: the study region of Lower Austria with its diverse agricultural landscapes and the metropolis of Vienna in the centre offers a rich laboratory. The plains and hills in the east, the plateau and mountains in the northwest, the flat and hilly countryside south of the Danube, the low and high mountains in the south – in each region people faced different challenges in how to use the land through crop cultivation and animal husbandry and to survive, also in combination with non-agricultural activities.
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