Nikola Blaschke

Biography

Since 2019, Nikola Blaschke is a Ph.D. candidate at the Chair of Social and Institutional Change in Agricultural Development at the University of Hohenheim.

She obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Sciences from the University of Hohenheim (2016) and her Master’s degree in International Development Management from the University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus (2018).

Nikola’s Ph.D. research is funded by a scholarship awarded by the Landesgraduiertenförderung Baden-Württemberg. Her second home is in Malaysia, where she spends a lot of time since she volunteered there in 2012.

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PhD Research Project: An Analysis of the Concept of Food Sovereignty

Despite growing wealth, up to two billion people suffer from hunger and malnutrition. In recent years, civil society organizations that suggest alternative solutions to this crisis have increasingly gained a voice, such as the international peasant organization La Via Campesina, which advocates for a radical change of the current “agro-industrial” food system towards one which is democratically controlled by the people, what they call “food sovereignty”.

This research project examines how established development discourses (“agro-industrialization”) and alternative development discourses (“food sovereignty”) have grown historically to explore their strengths, contingencies and contradictions as well as their connection with broader cultural and societal shifts. This discursive approach, in combination with political and economic perspectives, allows developing a more critical stance towards all actors and organizations involved with agricultural development in order to think about meaningful ways to improve the lives of the vulnerable.