Guilherme Raj defends his PhD thesis: ‘It is about power: Unveiling power and empowerment in grassroots agri-food initiatives’

On 22 May 2024, Guilherme Raj defends his thesis titled ‘It is about power: Unveiling power and empowerment in grassroots agri-food initiatives’.

This PhD thesis aims to elucidate the role of power and empowerment in the sustainability transformation of agri-food systems. Guilherme focuses on agri-food transformation within grassroots agri-food initiatives, which serve as spaces for realising sustainable alternatives in agri-food systems. The primary contribution of this research lies in expanding the concepts of power and empowerment to capture how they emerge from micro-politics and collective identity formation and shape prefiguration within grassroots initiatives. For this purpose, Guilherme integrates different conceptualisations of power and empowerment with theories of sustainability transformation in novel ways and empirically investigate how power and empowerment shape the structuring of work relations, the inclusion of queer people, and the creation of leadership roles for women farmers in a specific type of grassroots agri-food initiative, namely community-supported agriculture (CSA), in Italy and Portugal.

To learn more about Guilherme’s research please go to this page.