People
Cassandra Cronin
ERI/PS2 Public Research Fellow
Cassandra Cronin is a farmer, artist, and PhD student in the cultural anthropology program. Her work looks at processes of commoning in U.S. agriculture – the ways farmers contest and create alternatives to commodification and privatization in land and seed systems. She is interested in both the legal and social infrastructures that are creatively (re)invented to allow for other-than-capitalist relations to flourish. Cassandra is a 2025 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellow.
The summer PS2 fellowship supported my preliminary fieldwork connecting with agricultural commoning projects across our local N.Y. food system. I’ve been interested in “commoning” – diverse and creative approaches to reclaiming and collectively stewarding the “commons” – since I myself was a farmer for years before embarking on my PhD journey. Struggling with the everyday contradictions of navigating between anti-capitalist, liberatory visions and market imperatives for maintaining a livelihood, I was compelled to better understand the ways commons and capitalism intersect.
So, I spent this past summer learning with farmers who are navigating the question of surviving better. Various farm projects are experimenting with different strategies for decommodification across a mosaic of fronts including land, labor, seeds, food, and transportation logistics. They are using strategies like community land trusts, cooperative trucking routes, workshares, mutual-aid farming, participatory seed breeding, free seed sharing, and more. In broad strokes, these projects challenge individualistic and competitive norms and aim to build collective, cooperative, and relational infrastructures, despite systemic constraints. Could this mushrooming network of commoning projects create the potential for an emergent livable future?
I started developing a relational methodological approach to explore my research questions. In research on commoning, relationality is both an analytical theme and the method; commoning projects work on small scales and rather than scaling up as individuals, these projects scale out and across through linkages, forming networks “mycellially.” Therefore, the ways these projects build relationships, forged through trust and reciprocity, is key. So, rather than looking at farms as bounded entities, I am siting my project in the “food web,” where my research will follow connections. Secondly, I began developing an arts-based methodology, through which I am imagining the patch working of projects as a “political quilt,” and materially working on a collaborative quilting project.
(In the West Branch Commons, rows of vegetables stretch towards a distant greenhouse.)
(The author developed this film sustainably by replacing toxic developer chemicals with homegrown sage.)
I think this research is important because In the United States today, farmland has become a speculative asset, structurally dependent on exploiting labor. The question of agrarian futures is looming large because over the next two decades, half of all U.S. farmland is expected to change hands. The fork in the road indicates either further industrial consolidation and financialization, or an intentional turn towards democratization and decommodification. So far, facing financialized capitalism’s brunt has led many to recognize the importance of collaboration, and young and BIPOC farmers facing land access barriers have been developing innovative cooperative models precisely because traditional ownership is impossible. The relative flourishing of collaborative networks around New York may offer lessons for how people everywhere can resist the privatization of life and livelihood.
I’m grateful the PS2 fellowship allowed me to get my hands in the earth this summer while learning from amazing farmers about the ways they are imagining and working hard for a more just and sustainable future for us all.
