Category Archives: General

General issues.

Online Thesis Market 2021

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Rural Sociology, Sociology of Development & Change and Health & Society

February 8 & 9 (16:00-17:00)

Live online presentations about research projects and thesis topics & Online bar to meet and talk to potential supervisors

Join us! You can add yourself @ Teams by using this link.

Make sure to use your WUR email account. Your Teams request will be accepted some days before the market takes place (you’ll receive a notification about this).

The MS Teams page will be open all week from 8-12 February. There will be lots of information available about current research projects, thesis topics, potential supervisors, thesis vacancies and more.

75th Anniversary: 15) Marquetalia: Tegen de stroom in, maar met de beweging mee

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In 1979 verscheen het eerste nummer van Marquetalia, een tijdschrift over landbouw en politiek. Tot de oprichters van het tijdschrift behoorden Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, de latere hoogleraar en hoofd van de vakgroep Rurale Sociologie RSO, maar ook anderen die de rurale sociologie in de jaren tachtig en negentig weer op de kaart zetten, zoals de agrarische socioloog en voormalig RSO collega Jaap Frouws, die later een spraakmakende politiek-sociologische studie over mest en macht schreef (waarover later meer in een blog), en Jan Schakel, de latere onderwijscoördinator van RSO. Na zes nummers hield het tijdschrift op te bestaan. Het redaktiekollektief sprankelde nog van nieuwe ideeën, maar men woonde en werkte te ver van elkaar – verspreidt over drie continenten – en nieuwe carrières boden nieuwe netwerken en kansen. Een deel van het kollektief ging de kern vormen van RSO. Continue reading →

75th Anniversary: 14) Is the Future of Rural Sociology Urban? Is the Veluwe City?

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“Nationaal Park De Hoge Veluwe” by F.d.W. is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The functions and meaning attributed to the rural are manifold (Woods 2011: 1). Primarily, it operates as the intersection of “man and nature” (Ploeg 1997: 41), where for centuries most of our food, fiber, and fuel have been produced (Woods 2011: 1) but which now also provides the landscapes and scenery where visitors ‘slow-down’ or search for adventure and sensation (Buscher and Fletcher 2017) while comprising spaces of identification and belonging (Jongerden 2018). Further, the rural acquires meaning in relation to its complement: the urban. Often defined as opposites in terms of land use, population density, or social bonds, among others (Cloke 2006), these “constitute the complex unity of society viewed from a spatial angle” (Gilbert 1982: 609). This variety of functions and meanings has made the rural not only an epistemologically uncertain concept, but also a normative one.This normativity and uncertainty is part of the heritage of rural sociology. Continue reading →

Research and internship opportunities in regenerative agriculture

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Are you passionate about:
Food systems transformation?
Regenerative agriculture and agroecology?
Climate change and planetary health?
Farmers living amid the COVID-19 pandemic?
Qualitative and mixed method social science research?

We are looking for masters and advanced undergraduates who want an active role in data collection and data entry with a large-scale qualitative and quantitative research project led by the Midwest Healthy Ag research team.

Midwest Healthy Ag is a sociological research project launched by Regeneration Midwest in the United States, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health and Climate Solutions Program.

The study is currently entering the data collection phase, which will consist of over 200 interviews with farmers across six agrarian states in the Midwest United States. The interviews will ask farmers about their experiences dealing with multiple crises in conventional agriculture, regenerative farming practices, environmental health and climate change, as well as the impact of COVID-19 on livelihoods and community health and wellbeing. The interviews will be taking place over the next six months.

You can join our team as an intern/research assistant by collecting historical and contextual information on selected agrarian communities, doing data entry of farmer interviews into Qualtrics, and participating in our extended research network as we conduct qualitative and quantitative data analysis. We can also explore possibilities for utilizing project data and materials for academic theses and papers.

Get in touch! We will be accepting interns and assistants in early January 2021.

For more information on the project and our team, our website: https://midwesthealthyag.org

Contact at WUR: Serena Stein serena.stein@wur.nl (Postdoctoral Researcher at SDC & RSO)

75th Anniversary: 13) Reflections: From Rural Sociology to a Sociology of Place?

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Place has figured central in the work of the Rural Sociology Group. In a way this is, of course, already implicated by the adjective “rural” which adds a spatial identity to the sociology we do. Taking this identity as a social practice and the production of meaningful differences as points of departure (Hofstee 1946, Ploeg 1993, Wiskerke 2007), my own research gradually started to crystalize around the emergence of new spatial realities beyond ‘rural’  and ‘urban’.  At the background of this interest is the will to understand how people address inequality and uncertainty, and how they sustain themselves individually and collectively, socially and spatially. Continue reading →