The Rural Sociology Group of Wageningen University will celebrate its 75th Anniversary on the 13th of May 2022. Join our event entitled “Rural Sociology: past, present and future” and reflect upon the past and present of rural sociology and discuss its future challenges.
Discover the heartbeat of our workplace in the video series “Rural Sociology: Passionate@Work”. Join us as team members share the driving forces that make working at the Rural Sociology Group a fulfilling experience. From shared values to exciting projects, get an inside look at what fuels our enthusiasm and commitment.
In our fifth episode, we showcase Thirza Andriessen, who shares her enthusiasm for the Rural Sociology Group, highlighting the inspiring colleagues and the diverse approaches the group employs in addressing issues.
The course is co-taught by Rural Sociology (Mark Vicol and Oona Morrow), Cultural Geography (Chizu Sato) and Knowledge, Technology and Innovation (Katherine Legun) staff. The focus of the course is a deep dive into radical theories that conceptualize post- and anti-capitalist transitions beyond a technocratic understanding of sustainability.
This course examines radical and critical theories of change that explicitly challenge the dominant capitalist global food system. In the course we seek to problematize and re-theorize often taken for granted categories that the status quo of our food system is built around – sustainability; technology; production; economy; growth; and capitalism itself. Food and food systems are deeply political, shaped by historical structures. Yet, food systems are also shaped by the everyday practices of human and non-human actors. The course therefore does not adopt an a-priori ontology of food system change, but rather explores radical theory across the structure-agency divide.Engaging with key readings and texts, we examine theoretical approaches including Marxist political economy, diverse economies, science and technology studies, more-than-human approaches and feminist political ecology. Each week, we discuss a theoretical approach in relation to four cross-cutting themes of food system change:property; labour; ecology; and technology. In the course we also critically examine the role of the neoliberal university in realizing just food futures. Throughout the course, students are encouraged to discover and develop their own theoretical framework for radical change. In the final week of the course, students are tasked with applying theory to creatively imagine their own post anti-capitalist food future.
Be sure to check out this video featuring Mark Vicol, where he provides additional insights into the course:
Welcome to the blog of the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University. Here, we share insights about people, projects, and publications within our group. Our focus lies in the exploration of food provisioning dynamics, agrarian transformations, as well as rural and regional development from a comparative perspective.
As part of its counter-insurgency strategy to reclaim the countryside in southeast Anatolia from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK), the Turkish Armed Forces evacuated and destroyed rural settlements on a massive scale in the 1990s. According to official figures, 833 villages and 2,382 small rural settlements, totalling 3,215 settlements, were evacuated and destroyed in fourteen provinces in the east and southeast of Turkey. Several plans for resettlement or the controlled rural return of Kurdish villagers had already been made and discussed when the evacuations took place. It took until 2001, however, for a comprehensive plan to be released, one that, as it turned out, was more concerned about the settlement structure in Turkey than with the forced migrants, and this must be seen against the background of the Kemalist elite in Turkey, which has been preoccupied with the production of places and people as bearers of Turkish identity since the establishment of the Republic.
This Capita Selecta course is organized by Stichting ReGeneratie in collaboration the Rural Sociology chair group. The course is not funded by the university and contains many excursions. We therefore need to ask a course fee of €100 person for traveling, meals and tours. You will be visiting the oldest food forests and meet the key players in food forestry in the Netherlands. You can register yourself by completing this form.
