Join us for the WGSS Speaker Series! Snacks will be provided. Climate change permeates rural Central American life in ways that exacerbate gendered forms of everyday violence. In this talk, Mayorga and Sexsmith examine the experiences of violence against women farmers in La Paz, Honduras and argue that acute and slow environmental stressors interact with gendered livelihoods in rural Honduras in ways that are perceived to heighten women’s risks of gender-based violence. For example, climate change is undermining food security, increasing economic stress, and intensifying migration pressures. They show how these interactions between climate change and gendered livelihoods are shaped by gender-based violence risk factors at the individual, household, community, and broader social levels.

Read about the speakers below!

Andres Mayorga is a Ph.D. student in rural sociology and transdisciplinary research in environment and society at Penn State. His research sits at the intersection of critical agrarian studies, decolonial studies, and political ecology and economy. Before coming to Penn State, he worked with Miskito and Garifuna communities on Honduras’s northern coast to understand how fisheries laws systematically excluded ancestral territorial and maritime rights and how those rights could be better incorporated into national legislation. In recent years, his work has focused on Indigenous communities in El Salvador that survived persecution and civil war, examining the interplay between some of the most violent expressions of power against Indigenous agrarian life and the diverse forms of resistance and survival that persist across Indigenous territories and ontologies. His broader academic aspiration is to work alongside diverse agrarian peoples and identities to imagine and build agrarian futures grounded in coexistence, peace, justice, and dignity.

Kathleen Sexsmith is an associate professor of rural sociology and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Her scholarship takes an applied, community-engaged, and qualitative approach to farmworker well-being and gendered inequalities in agriculture, primarily in the Northeastern United States and in Central America. She collaborates closely with colleagues in Penn State Extension and non-profit organizations in the United States and Latin America on integrated outreach and research projects. Some of her current work addresses language barriers on Pennsylvania farms, fair labor practices under conservation and sustainable agriculture programs, scaling up farmer field and business school approaches in international development, and gender-based violence under environmental stress.