We are looking for motivated BSc students that are interested in writing a thesis with the Rural Sociology Group on the topic of place-shaping. The student will engage in a literature-based study, starting literature will be provided by the supervisor. The report will preferably be written in English.
- The (re-)appreciation of places; paying attention to socio-cultural practices; people’s sense of place; regional identities, narratives and story-lines, and branding of places[1];
- Individual values and collective culture as the ‘inner’ dimension of sustainability; addressing questions such as: why would people get engaged in sustainability initiatives and self-organization; how and why do people value places but also oppose to the spatial planning of new projects, such as wind-energy parks; how are citizens initiatives and place-shaping influenced by awareness, culture, identities and values; Which ‘policy scripts’ can be identified addressing the role of culture in places?
- Collective agency, emerging grassroots initiatives, alliances and coalitions; addressing the questions: how can spatial development enable the ‘energetic society’? How do people on the local and regional administrative level reflect on and negotiate the conditions of their engagement in place-shaping, how do they express agency and create a countervailing power in rural and urban development; how can effective (public-private) alliances and coalitions be build?
- Leadership of place; which acknowledges the role of shared, collaborative (knowledge) leadership in building collective agency, in attuning the institutional setting to the specificities of place, thus enabling a place-based approach.
- Methodology; Qualitative case-study research; Participatory approaches; Action-research; Value-oriented approach, Appreciative Inquiry.
Debates in contemporary social theory and political geography on the use of relational theory as a conceptual framework (found in the works of Escobar, Harvey, Massey and others), have generated a fertile ground to the deconstruction of the concept of place as bounded space. Through the use of a relational approach, space is seen as a social construction (Harvey, 1994). Consequently, it becomes a result of interactions, which are neither static nor limited to boundaries. In other words, thinking space relationally means that place is not defined as a locality or mere geographic position, but as a complex network of relations, a product of multiple trajectories and practices (Massey, 2004).
