News

Keynote Esther Peeren @ Re-Reading British and Irish Landscapes in the 21st Century Conference

On 14-15 June 2024, Esther Peeren will give a keynote at the Re-Reading British and Irish Landscapes in the 21st Century conference at the University of Mannheim titled “Globalized Rural Landscapes in Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency and Vron Ware’s Return of a Native: Learning from the Land.”

In Death of a Discipline, Gayatri Spivak calls the rural the “forgotten front of globalization” as the way globalization is spectralizing the rural remains largely unnoticed from perspectives on globalization that center the urban. While Spivak situates this spectralization of the rural in the Global South, it also affects rural areas in the Global North. In this lecture, I argue that, in the UK, because of the lingering tendency to conceive of rural landscapes as properly idyllic or pastoral, it is particularly difficult to make visible the longstanding spectralizing impact globalization has had on such landscapes, which are entangled with colonial and industrial histories that have left deep scars on the land and on the human and more-than-human lives unfolding on and in it. It seems that recognizing these scars is often only possible in retrospect, from a position of having been or being at a spatial distance from the rural. Through a comparative close reading of Daisy Hildyard’s 2022 novel Emergency, in which a woman caught in a city apartment during a Covid lockdown looks back on her childhood in a rural – but in hindsight far from idyllic – village in Yorkshire, and Vron Ware’s autobiographical Return of a Native: Learning from the Land, in which the author returns to the village in Hampshire where she grew up, aiming to “read the signs” present in the landscape there of past and present crises, I explore how the spectralization of the rural by globalization may be highlighted so that the rural is no longer mistaken for a refuge from globalization.

For the conference program, see here.

Imagining Rural Futures @ Department of Geography, University of Sheffield

On 25 April 2024, the Department of Geography is excited to present a day dedicated to exploring the significance of rural landscapes in shaping our collective future. A workshop on Speculative Future Wetlands by Rowan Jaines (University of Sheffield) and Hester Buck (University of Bristol) will be followed by lectures by Esther Peeren (University of Amsterdam) and Michael Woods (University of Aberystwyth).

See the program here.

Lecture Esther Peeren in 2023-24 School of Museum Studies (University of Leicester) Wednesday Seminar

On 24 April 2024, Esther Peeren will give a hybrid lecture titled “Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World: Beyond the Global Village as a Metaphor” at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester.

Until recently, the main focus of academic and public debates about globalization was on the urban environments containing, since 2007, a majority of the world population. The rural’s most conspicuous appearance in early globalization theory came in the form of media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s assertion that “the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.” In the first part of this lecture, I explore how the notion of the global village was much more than a mere metaphor, being derived from the British colonial strategy of villagization implemented in Kenya. The reality of the global village – as a social form prompted not by new electronic technologies but by the longstanding global reach of capitalism and colonialism – is further explored in the second part of the lecture by looking at Daisy Hildyard’s 2022 novel Emergency, in which a woman living through the Covid-pandemic in a city remembers her childhood in a Yorkshire village, and Vron Ware’s 2022 history and memoir Return of a Native: Learning from the Land, which traces land ownership and uses in the part of Hampshire where she grew up from the 18th to the 21st century.

Lecture Esther Peeren - Staying with the Village: Imagining Rural Globalization in Ruijin Li’s Return to Dust @ King’s College London

On 22 March 2024, Esther Peeren gave a lecture on imagining rural globalization at the URDST (Urbanisation, Rural Development, and Social Transformations) research group at the Lau China Institute, King’s College London. The departure point for this lecture was the way the global city is recognized as a reality, while the global village continues to be taken mostly as a metaphor. In the Chinese context of extremely rapid urbanization, the focus has often been on the lives built by rural-to-urban migrants in the cities; how this migration has impacted rural communities has received less attention. Esther looked briefly at Ruijun Li’s film Return to Dust (2022) as an example of a film centering and revaluating rural ways of life, while also critiquing the various hierarchies (gender, class, age, ableness) that pervade this life.

Reading for and from the Hinterland Panel @ American Comparative Literature Association

On 15-16 March 2024, Esther Peeren and Tjalling Valdés Olmos co-organized the panel “Reading for and from the HINTERLAND” at the American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting in Montréal.

The panel sought to push the conceptualization of the hinterland by reading for and from it. Contributors were invited to consider hinterlands, historical and contemporary, as stretching across urban, rural and wilderness, traversing land, water and air; from perspectives including but not limited to the environmental and oceanic humanities to posthumanism, affect theory, new formalism and new materialism; and in media from literature, film and television to the arts.

Find the full panel information here.

Podcast Chen Zhou @ FoodThink (in Mandarin)

In Episode 20240303 of FoodThink Podcast, Chen Zhou discussed (in Mandarin) the food production system and the way the capitalist market shapes the appearance and taste of contemporary food with an ecological farmer and a lover of cooking.

Listen to the episode here.

Spui25 Amsterdam - Presentation of Planetary Hinterlands Book (in Dutch)

On 15 February 2024, Marrigje Paijmans, Esther Peeren, Hanneke Stuit, Tjalling Valdés Olmos and Maarten Zwiers will discuss At this event, five contributors to the new book Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment and Care – Marrigje Paijmans, Esther Peeren, Hanneke Stuit, Tjalling Valdés Olmos and Maarten Zwiers – will discuss (in Dutch) the concept of “hinterland,” a colonial term that is being revived in the present to gain a better understanding of those places – across the urban, suburban, rural and wilderness – that offer material and logistical support for global capitalism (resources, labor, infrastructures), while often remaining invisible, where this invisibility might also offer opportunities for devising ways of living otherwise (on a damaged planet). What forms of extraction and abandonment are found in the hinterland? And what new forms of living and thinking, inspiration and care, are emerging at this “edge” of the capitalist system?

Exhibition “Who Owns the Countryside” (“Van wie is het platteland?) @ Rijksmuseum Twente

On 15 December 2023, Esther Peeren visited the exhibition “Who Owns the Countryside” at the Rijksmuseum Twente in Enschede, together with Wapke Feenstra of MyVillages, whose installation “Cow and Landscape” (pictured) is central to the exhibition. The exhibition is on until 28 January 2024, and you can read a review (in Dutch) of the exhibition in art magazine Metropolis M here, and listen to a podcast (in Dutch) in which Wapke discusses “Cow and Landscape” with art journalist Luuk Heezen here.

Keynote Esther Peeren - Rethinking the Rural North Conference, University of Copenhagen

On 7 December 2023, Esther Peeren will give a keynote on “Rural Hinterlands” at the “Rethinking the Rural North through Environmental Literature, Film and TV” conference at the University of Copenhagen.

Find the conference program here.

PhD Defense Anke Bosma

On 13 December 2023 at 10:00, Anke Bosma defended her PhD dissertation, “I Don’t Think That’s Romantic At All!”: Imagining the Dutch Rural in an Age of Globalization.

Lecture Center for Global Studies, Bern University

On 16 November 2023, Esther Peeren will give a lecture on Planetary Hinterlands at the Global Studies Center at Bern University. This lecture introduces the forthcoming volume Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment and Care (co-edited with Pamila Gupta, Sarah Nuttall and Hanneke Stuit).

Peeren will discuss how hinterlands manifest, historically and presently, and emphasize the importance of looking from the hinterland and reading for the affectivities of the hinterland, both those associated with the destructive demands that Anthropogenic capitalism-colonialism places on it, and those afforded by the hinterland despite and in excess of these demands.

Chen Zhou Presentation @ Beijing Farmers’ Market

On 22 September 2023, Chen Zhou presented her PhD project at the Beijing Farmers’ Market Community Store in Beijing. Her talk, organized by Foodthink, was entitled “When We Talk about Food, What does Authenticity Mean?”

When conducting fieldwork at the Beijing Farmers’ Market, Chen Zhou noticed that both the farmers and the consumers frequently use the word "authentic" to express their perceptions of ecological food. In this presentation, Chen Zhou  discusses her interpretation of “authenticity” from a relational perspective while drawing attention to the materiality of food.

Decolonisation and the Archive: Languages and Method in the Digital Era Symposium, WiSER

On 16-17 August 2023, Esther Peeren and Tjalling Valdés Olmos participated in the Decolonisation and the Archive seminar at WiSER at Wits University in Johannesburg.

Find the program here.

Biennial Gendered Worlds Lecture by Pamila Gupta

On 9 August 2023, Prof Pamila Gupta, co-editor of Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment and Care gave the Biennial Gendered Worlds Lecture at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. The lecture, based on her chapter in the Planetary Hinterlands book, was titled “Landscaping South Africa’s Gendered Hinterlands” and can be watched in full here.

PhD Defense Tjalling Valdés Olmos

On 19 June 2023, Tjalling Valdés Olmos defended his PhD entitled Genres of Rurality: Unsettling Affect in Popular Imaginations of the Globalized US Rural.

XXIXth ESRS Conference

In July 2023, the XXIXth European Society for Rural Sociology (ESRS) Conference took place at L’Institut Agro Rennes/Angers in France. Esther Peeren was on the scientific committee for the conference, which has as its theme Crises and the Futures of Rural Areas. Read more about the conference here.

Showcases of Rural Modernity Panel @ ENIUGH 2023

On 30 June 2023, Esther Peeren was commentator for the “Showcases of Rural Modernity: Agricultural Exhibitions and Representations of Rural Development in Comparative and Transregional Perspective” panel, organized by Steffi Marung and Ana Moledo (Leipzig University) at the European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH) conference at Leiden University. The panel comprised the following presentations:

Amalia Ribi Forclaz (Geneva), “The Peasant Peace Conference (1935, 1937): Staging rurality and mobilizing the ‘peasantry’”

Steffi Marung (Leipzig), “Showcasing the Soviet countryside: The All-Union Agricultural Exhibition from the 1930s to the 1950s”

Sarah Kunkel (Berlin), “Nkrumah’s Farms: State-controlled agriculture and nation-building in Ghana”

“The Brand of the Farmer” article in De Groene Amsterdammer (in Dutch)

In May 2023, Esther Peeren was interviewed for an article in De Groene Amsterdammer (in Dutch) about “the brand of the farmer.” The article, authored by Casper Thomas, examines the way the collective desire for an idyllic countryside life is marketed for both commercial and political gain. Read it here.

Kaas = NL? Book Review in Trouw (in Dutch)

In April 2023, the Dutch national newspaper Trouw reviewed the edited volume Kaas = NL? (Cheese = NL?), to which Anke Bosma and Esther Peeren contributed a chapter. Read the review here.

ACLA Conference - Panel on Life in Ruins: Inhabiting Empire’s Sacrifice Zones

In March 2023, Esther Peeren participated in a panel at the annual conference of the ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) on Life in Ruins: Inhabiting Empire’s Sacrifice Zones (organized by Hannah Cole and Pierre-Elliot Caswell). The paper presented was titled “Living On in Extractive Rural Hinterlands.”

Radio Appearance (in Dutch)

In March 2023, Esther Peeren was a guest on the radio program Onvoltooid Verleden Tijd (OVT), together with cultural historian Gerard Rooijakkers, to talk about the persistence and political mobilization of romanticized imaginations of farming in the Netherlands. Listen here.

“Tot op de bodem” Newsletter

In December 2022, Esther Peeren contributed a piece (in Dutch) to the newsletter “Tot op de bodem” produced by the Environment & Society research group at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. The newsletter focuses on the consequences of gas extraction in rural Groningen, and Esther’s contribution focuses on the question of whether rural Groningen can be seen as a sacrifice zone. Read the newsletter here.

IMAJINE Possible Future Scenarios

The EU-funded IMAJINE (Integrative Mechanisms for Addressing Spatial Justice and Territorial Inequalities in Europe) project, led by Michael Woods, aims to develop integrative policy mechanisms for tackling territorial inequalities and promoting spatial justice. As part of the project, a set of possible future scenarios has been developed, to which Esther Peeren has written a response from the perspective of the Rural Imaginations project. Read the response here.

Onder Mediadoctoren Podcast

In November 2022, Esther Peeren participated in the Onder Mediadoctoren podcast (in Dutch). With podcast hosts Linda Duits and Vincent Crohne, she discussed how Dutch farmers are associated with authenticity. Listen here.

The Spectralized Rural and the Haunting Force of the Idyll

On 29 September 2022, Esther Peeren gave a keynote lecture at the interdisciplinary workshop “Politiken der Idylle,” held at Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, organized by Michalina Golinczak and Pablo Valdivia. The keynote lecture was entitled “The Spectralized Rural and the Haunting Force of the Idyll.” The full program of the workshop is available here.

Rural History Conference, Uppsala, June 2022

At the fifth biennial conference of the European Rural History Organisation (EURHO) in Uppsala from 20-23 June 2022, Tjalling Valdés Olmos chaired the “Representations of the Countryside” session, which featured four presentations: 

  • Michael Belding, “‘We Have Taken’: Indigenous Dispossession in the Agricultural Reform Movement”

  • Agata Koprowicz, “Between Subordination and Emancipation: Peasants and Photography in Poland (1864–1937)”

  • Tjalling Valdés Olmos, “Farm at the End of the World: Representations of Rural Southwestern History, Environmental Crisis, and Settler Colonialism in US Dystopian Fiction”

  • Esther Peeren, “Representing Rural History as a Haunting Force in Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days and Apex Hides the Hurt” 

For the full program of the conference, see: https://www.ruralhistory2021.se/   

Hinterlands at Sea in Ben Smith's Doggerland

On 11 April 2022, Esther Peeren gave a virtual guest lecture at the European Studies Group at the University of Iowa entitled "Hinterlands at Sea in Ben Smith's Doggerland".

While the rural-urban-riverine-maritime hinterlands of contemporary global capital are as contested as the hinterlands of the heydays of colonialism, instead of as spaces to be developed, they manifest as overdeveloped to the point of being laid waste to.

In her lecture, Peeren explored the question of what it means to live in such a hinterland of abandonment by turning to Ben Smith’s 2019 novel Doggerland, set on a wind farm in the North Sea maintained by two men in a dystopian future when the world is run by the Company and all life – including the life of the Company itself – is petering out.

Image: Studio Ronald van der Heide

Boeren met toekomst | Raad voor de leefomgeving en infrastructuur (rli.nl)

In December 2021, the Council for the Environment and Infrastructure (Rli), a strategic advisory board for the Dutch government, published an advisory report to the Minister of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality entitled "Farming with a Future" (in Dutch). Esther Peeren served as an external referent for the report. Read more about the report here (in Dutch).

ENTWINED Online Assemblage - Institute for Creative Arts Practice - Newcastle University (ncl.ac.uk)

The ENTWINED Online Assemblage, released 29 November 2021, is an asynchronous online conference, hosted by Newcastle University’s Institute for Creative Arts Practice. Consisting of a collection of short presentations, this conference seeks to interrogate the interconnectedness of rural land and lives. Invited speakers include artists and academics that are concerned with rurality and/or what makes ‘place’. One of the videos is by Rural Imaginations project leader Esther Peeren. View the program videos here.

Rural Imaginations @ Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (RIAS)

On 1-2 November 2021 the Rural Imaginations team visited the Roosevelt Institute For American Studies in Middelburg, the Netherlands. During a two-day workshop we discussed links between our research, with particular reference to the intersection of colonialism, slavery and the rural, as well as methodological questions and the Hinterlands book project. Find the program here.

Hinterlands: A Project in the Rural, Literary and Environmental Humanities

On 3-4 June 2021, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, co-convened an interdisciplinary online symposium on Hinterlands. The CfP can be found here and a video recording of the opening session, with introductions by Sarah Nuttall and Esther Peeren, and keynotes by Hanneke Stuit and Pamila Gupta, here.

The Dutch Rural as Eternal Idyll (in Dutch)

An article in Dutch by Esther Peeren appeared in the 2021 special issue of the journal De Lage Landen focusing on “What To Do with the Rural?” The article can be found here.

Beyond Impasses of Rural Time

On 28 October 2021, during the international workshop Eternal Presents and Resurfacing Futures: Postcolonial / Postsocialist Dynamics of Time and Memory in Literature Art, Emily Ng and Hanneke Stuit delved into the ways in which the rural tends to be seen as stuck in time. What perceptions of time “block” the rural? And how can the rural get “unstuck,” making room for more productive (post)human and interspecies connections? For the full programme, see here!

Image courtesy of grammartop.com

Cultural Imaginations of the Rural: Beyond the Idyll (in Dutch)

As part of a lecture series organized by the Illustere School at the University of Amsterdam, on 1 March 2021 Esther Peeren spoke on cultural imaginations of the rural. Many of these rural imaginations - such as the popular Dutch reality TV show Boer zoekt vrouw (Farmer Wants a Wife) - are grounded in the idyll, causing non-idyllic aspects of the contemporary rural to remain invisible. Why do many people remain so attached to a genre that is so badly attuned to rural realities and what consequences does this have?  

Rural Imaginations x Rural Sociology Group WUR

On 29 March 2021, we presented the Rural Imaginations project to the Rural Sociology Group (RSO) of Wageningen University & Research at an online lunch meeting. The Rural Sociology Group studies the dynamics of food provisioning, agrarian change, and rural and regional development with an international comparative perspective.
For more information on the RSO, see: About the RSO Group - WUR.

Why Covid-19 should make us rethink multilocality

Modern lives are increasingly multilocal – but rural-urban policies are often yet to catch up. ROBUST’s Bryonny Goodwin-Hawkins, Ulla Ovaska and Theresia Oedl-Wieser reflect on what we know about multilocality, and what we should rethink as rural regions look ahead to futures beyond recovery.
A short report on multilocality from ROBUST’s Public Infrastructures and Social Services Community of Practice, featuring examples from Austria, Germany, Finland and Wales is now available. The report can be downloaded here.

Podcast on the cinematic depiction of European countrysides

PhD candidate Anke Bosma talks to Gil Kidron and Rutger Vos about imaginations of the European countryside. The conversation touches on a myriad of topics central to the Rural Imaginations project: the rural being presented as backwards; tight-knit rural communities conceived as idyllic and as horrifying; the role of capitalism in the rural and how this role is often (made) invisible; and the way the rural is imagined as white and heteronormative.

Therapeutic Politics of Care: New Ethnographies of Asia

On 20 November 2020, a live webinar on Therapeutic Politics of Care was held. It can be streamed here.
The webinar marked the launch of Emily Ng’s book A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao (2020, University of California Press).

Expert Meeting: Rural Imaginations X Dissent Magazine

On 7 May 2020 Tjalling Valdes Olmos organized an expert meeting with Max Fraser and Garrett Dash Nelson, the editors of a 2019 special issue of Dissent Magazine titled “Left Paths in Rural America.” You can find more information about the event here and the special issue here.

Animal farms and Artificial Intelligence

The Guardian article “Facial Recognition for Pigs: Is It Helping Chinese Farmers or Hurting the Poorest” takes up the issues touched upon in Mindi Schneider’s lecture “Site, Source, and Sink: Rendering the Chinese Countryside in the Age of Pork“.

Agriculture and Patriarchy (in Dutch)

Where does patriarchy come from? According to biologist Carel van Schaik, with the arrival of agriculture the idea of the land as a possession takes root, creating the original conditions for a gender imbalance.

Re-Enchanting the Crisis: Reflections on Rurality, Futurity and COVID-19 in the United Kingdom

An article on the Covid pandemic & the Rural in the UK by Jilly Boyce Kay. European Journal of Cultural Studies 23.6 (2020)

Hanneke Stuit, Opening Academic Year 2020-2021, Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam (in Dutch)

Presentation by Hanneke Stuit (in Dutch) titled “De idylle aan de straat?”

Interview with Esther Peeren for University of Amsterdam Website

An interview with Esther Peeren about the Rural Imaginations project for the University of Amsterdam website.

Rurality in Europe

Special feature in Europe Now on Rurality in Europe (2020).

GLOBAL-RURAL ERC Project

“The Global Countryside: Rural Change and Development in Globalization (GLOBAL-RURAL)” is a major research project funded by the European Research Council, led by Michael Woods at the University of Aberystwyth. More details here.

Interview with Esther Peeren in Folia (in Dutch)

Interview, in Dutch, with Esther Peeren for Folia Magazine (2019).

Whitechapel Gallery, London: The Rural Assembly

From June 20-22, 2019, Esther Peeren, Hanneke Stuit, Emily Ng and Lelia Tavakoli Farsooni attended the Rural Assembly workshop at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Its aim was to challenge the assumptions made about rural life and culture, and to provide a new vision of the countryside grounded in everyday experience and a critique of the rural-urban binary.

Countryside Exhibition @ Guggenheim New York

Rem Koolhaas’ Countryside exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, opened in February 2020, but closed soon after because of the Covid-19 pandemic. This newspaper article contains information about the exhibition.

Manchester School of Art Creating the Countryside: the Rural Idyll Past and Present

The exhibition “Creating the Countryside” was held in 2017 and curated by Rosemary Shirley and Verity Elson.

MyVillages: The Rural

The Rural, edited by the artist collective Myvillages appeared in 2019. It presents “an investigation through texts, interviews, and documentation of the complex relationship between the urban, the rural, and contemporary cultural production.”

MyVillages Artist Collective

MyVillages is an artist collective founded by Kathrin Böhm (UK/DE), Wapke Feenstra (NL) and Antje Schiffers (DE) in 2003, to advocate for a new understanding of the rural as a place of and for cultural production.

Rurality Re-imagined: Villagers, Farmers, Wanderers and Wild Things

Edited by Ben Springer, Rurality Re-imagined (2018) contains a chapter by Esther Peeren titled “Villages Gone Wild: Death by Rural Idyll in The Casual Vacancy and Glue.”

Menelaos Gkartzios: Contemporary Arts in Rural Development

Contemporary Arts in Rural Development, the research project led by Menelaos Gkartzios (Newcastle University), is a UK-Japanese international network of stakeholders with expertise in contemporary arts practice, rural community development and rural planning.

Team Publication in Collateral

An article cluster called “Dutch Domestic Colonization: From Rural Idyll to Prison Museum” was published in Collateral, an online journal for cross-cultural close reading, in 2020. The cluster comprises contributions from Hanneke Stuit, Anke Bosma & Tjalling Valdés Olmos, Emily Ng and Esther Peeren. You can find the cluster here.

Aberystwyth Expert Meeting

In November 2019, the RURALIMAGINATIONS project held its first international expert meeting at the University of Aberysthwyth, in collaboration with Michael Woods. You can find the Expert Meeting Program here.