HASTAC 2023 Conference

In Central/South America, Asia, Africa, rural and Indigenous communities are unable to catalog their conservation efforts and agroecological techniques; as they are thwarted by international NGOs, private philanthropists, major foundations, and corporations. They are also inhibited by the aesthetics of Green New Deals, eco-modernism and Global North sustainability efforts. By engaging with concrete examples of community and state agroecology underway in the Global South, this paper offers a critical LIS approach that attends to differential forms of agricultural and ecological knowledge organization in peripheral countries, foregrounding agrarian/peasant populations as political and informational protagonists. This approach denies previous efforts that attribute to civilizing and colonizing these communities. This report will mention the knowledge organization patterns of embedded forms of small-scale farming and animal husbandry, biodiversity protection, and state-led ecological development. However, the central focus will be the language and translational barriers that prohibit and encourage digital divides and knowledge gaps between the Global North and South; these barriers will also be referred in addressed in conversation about global information inequality.The linguistic approach draws from organizational methods that LIS needs to disrupt in order to address the agrarian question. Translation within LIS academia has worked parallel to deliver information and the decolonization of translation is something that should be addressed immediately. While engaging the agrarian populations, actively participating in the act of translation within the global South is nonnegotiable. A huge component of this research was based on personal efforts to engage with artifacts in Spanish and Portuguese. Some artifacts will include; the educational efforts of La Via Campesina and dialógo de saberes, The Brazillian Landless Worker's Movement, UBPC Organóponico Vivero Alamar, and the Biodivesity Heirtage Library's model with Mexico.The current Global North informational structures provide a direct counterpoint to transnational agri-logistics frameworks, ecologically devastating tropical/subtropical monocropping, and “fortress conservation” platforms amid the global land rush. In drawing attention to these dynamics I hope to assert the centrality of the global agrarian question as it pertains to food production, environmental protection, and global South/Indigenous sovereignty in the development of future critical LIS approaches.