Rural Happenings
We always welcome rural-related CFPs and event announcements to share with our network.
Want to share something? Email us at: ruralimaginations@gmail.com
Call for Papers for Panel on “Contemporary Art and Rural Places”
Association for Art History Annual Conference, University of Bristol, 3-5 April 2024
Further details of the Conference can be found on the AAH website: https://forarthistory.org.uk/conference/2024-annual-conference/
Contemporary Art and Rural Places
‘The rural is not new. The rural is not static. The rural is not disappearing…The rural is a multitude and it is dynamic,’ declare the artist collective Myvillages in the introduction to their edited Documents of Contemporary Art collection: The Rural (Whitechapel/MIT 2019). This statement speaks to the complexity of rural places and the need to recognise them as sites of cultural production. Until recently the primary intersection between art and rural places has been through the idea/genre of landscape, however this overarching category of making and analysis can obscure artistic and curatorial practices that engage in and with rural places and their multiple communities. This panel welcomes papers that intentionally move the conversation beyond the canonical exploration of landscape in connection with rural places, instead beginning the process of delineating a critical space for contemporary art practices that imagine, activate and unearth a diverse and complex collection of real, imagined and potential ruralities. Themes for discussion might include (but are not limited to): the specific conditions of making or curating art in/with rural places; art practices that embody intersectional perspectives on rural places, contemporary art practices that generate new or alternative understandings of rural places; explorations of human/nonhuman communities in rural places; the rural as site of alternative economic models; food production; land ownership; environmental sustainability.
Panel Convenor: Dr Rosemary Shirley, School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester,
Please email your paper proposals direct to rad33@leicester.ac.uk providing a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 20-minute paper, your name and institutional affiliation (if any)
Deadline for submission: 10 November 2023
Call for Abstracts for the ESRS 2023 Congress
Rennes, France | 3-7 July 2023
Dear all,
the Call for Abstracts for the ESRS 2023 Congress in Rennes is now open. You can find the call and the list of working groups here:
https://esrs2023.institut-agro-rennes-angers.fr/call-papers
Please spread the call widely across your networks!
Best regards on behalf of the Scientific Committee,
Pavel Pospech
The Image of Peasant Communities in European Written Sources, Culture, and Art from Antiquity to the 20th century: Conference CfP
Lublin, Poland | 16-17 April 2024
The Institute of History at the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin in cooperation with the Institute of History and Archive Studies at the Pedagogical University of Cracow kindly invite you to the International Conference ‘The Image of Peasant Communities in European Written Sources, Culture, and Art from Antiquity to the 20th century’.
Read the full CfP here! Deadline 15 January 2023.
Un/Building the Future: The Country and The City in the Anthropocene: Conference CfP
Warwick, UK | 15-16 June 2023
Our interdisciplinary conference, Un/Building the Future: The Country and the City in the Anthropocene, will explore the co-constitution of the urban and rural in the face of the Anthropocene. Raymond Williams’s iconic The Country and the City (1973), which our title alludes to, scrutinised how the emergence of capitalism in the nineteenth century capsized ingrained narratives of urban and rural life. Un/Building the Future is concerned with whether the shifting environmental contours of the twenty-first century are having a similarly radical effect.
We are interested in contributions that examine how the unfolding environmental catastrophe is disturbing and reforming the symbolisations of the country and city, producing new locales, both real and imaginary, that are not quite contained by our traditional spatial horizons. How are the categories of the country and the city morphed by the ecological crisis? What does thinking these concepts together help us to understand about current climate trajectories? Are these ideas of the urban and the rural even viable, or must they be radically rethought? How are the spatial imaginaries of the Anthropocene approached from different perspectives in the field, whether that be feminist, queer, anti-racist, decolonial, Marxist or posthumanist?
Read the full CfP here! Deadline 20 Feb 2023.
3rd European Rural Geographies Conference: Call for Sessions
Dear colleagues,
We are happy to invite you for submitting sessions for the 3rd Rural Geographies Conference in Groningen, The Netherlands, from 26-29 June 2023!
The conference theme is Rural Geographies in Transition. Rural areas in Europe are under increasing and intersecting pressures and transitions. The landscapes, the actors, the uses, the challenges, and the ways in which the rural is produced and reproduced, are all changing rapidly. This brings forward new research questions and asks for new approaches, both in terms of theoretical perspectives and in terms of empirics. Therefore, we call for sessions suiting this focus, on topics as population developments, socio-spatial inequalities, quality of life, smart villages, landscape transitions, rural entrepreneurship, agricultural transformations, rural housing, energy transitions, and climate change adaptation.
Each session will provide room for several scientific paper presentations. However, if you are aiming for a special session format, please reach out to us first, then we can discuss the options together (ruralgeo2023@rug.nl).
To submit a session proposal, we ask for a brief description of the session theme and content, including the desired aims and outcomes (max 300 words). The proposal should also include a session title, your name and your session co-hosts if applicable. Please submit your session proposal here: https://www.ruralgeo2023.nl/call-for-sessions. The deadline is the 30th of November 2022. To be able to include as many different session organisers as possible, and to guarantee a diverse range of session topics, we appreciate a maximum of two session applications per person.
Special attention will be devoted to linking knowledge to policy and practice on our Policy Day on Wednesday 28 June. On this day, there will be room for several sessions on policy related topics, and on good practices of sharing knowledge and translating it into practices. Any ideas, thoughts, suggestions or good examples on this are welcome via ruralgeo2023@rug.nl!
After the closure of the session call, the proposals will be reviewed and we will inform you half December whether the session is accepted. After that, the call for papers will be communicated by both the conference organisation and the session hosts (deadline call for papers 19 January 2023). As a session host, you will be asked to review abstracts submitted to your session and to chair your session at the conference.
We are looking forward to receiving interesting session proposals and hope to see you in Groningen next year!
Best wishes,
On behalf of the local organising committee, Tialda Haartsen, Martijn van der Heide, Bettina Bock, Koen Salemink, Christina Rundel, Stephen Adaawen, Henk Hofstede & Yueyue Gao
3rd European Rural Geographies Conference
As promised in 2021, and after two cancellations because of COVID-19, we are happy to inform you that we will organise the 3rd European Rural Geographies Conference in Groningen, The Netherlands, from 26-29 June 2023. After Nantes 2014 and Braunschweig 2017, the European Rural Geography Conference has become a recognized place to meet rural geographers and other rural scholars to exchange ideas and knowledge. So please save the date!
The conference theme is Rural Geographies in Transition. Rural areas in Europe are under increasing and intersecting pressures, but many of these areas seem to be resilient. The landscapes, the actors, the uses, the challenges, and how the rural is produced and reproduced, are all changing rapidly. This brings forward new research questions and asks for new approaches, both in terms of theoretical perspectives and in terms of empirics, on topics such as PopulationDevelopments, Socio-spatial Inequalities, Governance and policies, Economic Challenges, Quality of Life, SmartVillages, Landscape Transitions, Rural Entrepreneurship, Agricultural Transformations, Rural Housing, Energy Transitions and Climate Change Adaptation.
The format of the conference is that we will invite those who are interested to organise sessions on the topic of their expertise and/or in the context of an ongoing research project. The rough timeline for RuralGeo2023 is:
• Half October 2022 - Call for session proposals
• Half December 2022 - Calls for papers
• Half January 2023 – Deadline for submitting papers
• First half of February 2023 – Acceptance of papers (and sessions)
So please take your time to consider organising a session; the official call for sessions will be communicated half October 2022.
At the moment, we are updating our website (www.ruralgeo2023.nl) and preparing the conference programme, which will at least consist of some plenary sessions, exciting field trips, a policy morning and attention for the EU’s Rural Pact.
We hope to see you all in Groningen in June 2023!
— prof. Tialda Haartsen
On behalf of the local organising committee: prof. Martijn van der Heide, prof. Bettina Bock, dr.Koen Salemink & Christina Rundel MSc
Email: ruralgeo2023@rug.nl
European Society for Rural Sociology (ESRS) congress
We'd like to invite you to participate in the European Society for Rural Sociology (ESRS) congress which will take place in July 2023 in Rennes, France.
Check out the website here: esrs2023.institut-agro-rennes-angers.fr/
The deadline for Working group proposals is 26 September, a call for papers will follow later in Autumn.
Hope to see many of you in Rennes!
— Pavel Pospech
Rural History Yearbook CFP
With pleasure I share a call for papers for the Rural History Yearbook/Jahrbuch für Geschichte des ländlichen Raumes 2024 (https://journals.univie.ac.at/index.php/rhy). The theme is “Rural films – Filme in der ländlichen Gesellschaft”. The editors of this volume (peter.moser@agrararchiv.ch, brigitte.semanek@ruralhistory.at, andreas.wigger@agrararchiv.ch) are looking for proposals and will organise a workshop to discuss potential contributions (in German or English) for this volume in Bern on the 16/17 November 2022. You will find the CfP here.
— Peter Veer