This project argues that specialty coffee offers a unique perspective into emerging global inequalities and their local configurations. By thinking relationally about the people who consume specialty coffee and those who produce it, this project explores the ways coffee links high-amenity urban centres in the Global North to transformations in land use in rural peripheries in the Global South. In particular, we turn to the proliferation of specialty coffee shops in Lisbon, Portugal, and to new coffee plantations in rural Brazil. While specialty coffee shops in Lisbon act as strategic co-working sites in a new urban economy of transnational remote workers and lifestyle migrants, specialty coffee production in Southeast Brazil has gained momentum as young producers join the market attracted by the industry’s booming growth figures and by emerging ideas about combining entrepreneurship and an imagined rural lifestyle. FARM2CUP proposes a multi-sited ethnography examining the ways specialty coffee has become an urban staple of gentrification and its ensuing consequences for rural dynamics in the Global South. The project will contribute to a better understanding of how emerging work practices such as transnational remote work and neo-rural entrepreneurship are globally connected through coffee. It offers an original, Lusophone-centred entry point into studies of planetary urbanization that are often focused on Anglophone contexts. FARM2CUP will explore how specialty coffee reinforces or reshuffles traditional dichotomies such as rural-urban, Global South-Global North, and centre-periphery, as well as its colonial division of labour and consumption.
