Since 2020 Sarah Graf has been pursuing a PhD at the Faculty of Agriculture at University of Hohenheim. Her PhD project combines the Farming Sytem approach with Marxian class analysis.

• Agrarian class relations
• Farming systems
• Quantifying exploitation

Land, Labour and Capital: Class Relations in West-African Farming Systems

West African agriculture represents a unique context: Land is relatively abundant, while labour and capital constrain production; household structures emphasize economic independence of all household members; and the prevalence of e.g. intercropping and perennial crops add complexity to farming systems. This leads to diverse informal contractual land, labour and capital relations, such as multiple forms of renting, moneylending, and sharecropping - as well as unique class structures. Using the West African context as a case study, the PhD project thus seeks methodological, conceptual and empirical advances to rural class analysis in order to analyse the interellations between class structures and farming systems.

MSc. Development Studies, SOAS University
Master thesis: Labour, Class and Technological Change: The System of Rice Intensification (SRI) in West Africa

BSc. Agricultural Sciences
Bachelor thesis: Challenges in Implementing Small Scale Solar Milk Cooling for Smallholder Farmers: A Comparative Case Study in Western Kenya

• Landesgraduiertenförderung, PhD scholarship (2020-2023)
• Carlo-Schmid-Programm (DAAD) (2019-2020)
• Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (2015-2019)

• Consultant for Disaster Risk Reduction and Impact Assessment at FAO
• Research assistant for data analysis at SOAS University
• Intern for Monitoring and Evaluation at GIZ (Green Innovation Centers)
• Farm hand on pastoral farms in Australia