Elizabeth Gardiner has been awarded a West African Research Association (WARA) Pre-Doctoral Fellowship. The fellowship provides her with significant funding for support of her fieldwork during summer, 2015, in Burkina Faso.  Focussing on economic aspects of land, her work pertains to subsistence farming and exchanging land for money, becoming standard practice in Burkina Faso. Contrary to the prevailing land grabbing narrative, the commodification and privatization of land in Burkina Faso is not dominated by large-scale deals between the state government and multi-national corporations, but rather by entrepreneurial processes between BurkinaBe businessmen and the rural people who are trading rights to communal land for money. Land tenure is not a bureaucratic system of ownership, but symbolic of social entrustment and obligation. In West Africa, tenure practices are an ever-adapting means to maintain social cohesion in an ever-changing political and natural environment. As land becomes a commodity that can be owned and fenced, social relations built off of communal land practices shift from flexible to rigid, inclusive to exclusive; leaving communities at risk for conflict. Exclusionary land relations also decrease social capital critical for maintaining livelihood resilience. While previous research focuses on land conflicts that are the result of commodification, her study aims to better understand the processes in which farmers end up selling their communal land, and how the social value of land changes. In Burkina Faso, domestic entrepreneurs are implementing these processes, and thus, they are agents of social change.