The desire to stay

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The Dutch nitrogen crisis has emphatically illuminated the gap between “Randstad” and “Randland”. But exactly how wide is the gap? Is there merely a struggle for money, production and nature? A story about the pain of the disappearing ‘home’.

Bettina Bock was asked by Sociologie Magazine to write an essay about farmers and rural dwellers in the context of their early 2023 issue on ‘conflict’. Together with Jolien Klok they employed the concept of restanza to reflect on current rural discontent in the Netherlands. Unfortunately it’s only available in Dutch, click here to read the essay.

Unpacking gender mainstreaming: a critical discourse analysis of agricultural and rural development policy in Myanmar and Nepal by Dawn Cheong et al.

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Dawn Cheong is PhD-candidate at the Rural Sociology Group (dawn.cheong@wur.nl) . Her first paper has just been published open access in ‘Agriculture and Human Values‘:
Cheong, D.D., Bock, B. & Roep, D. (2023) Unpacking gender mainstreaming: a critical discourse analysis of agricultural and rural development policy in Myanmar and Nepal https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-023-10502-x.

Abstract
Conventional gender analysis of development policy does not adequately explain the slow progress towards gender equality. Our research analyses the gender discourses embedded in agricultural and rural development policies in Myanmar and Nepal. We find that both countries focus on increasing women’s participation in development activities as a core gender equality policy objective. This creates a binary categorisation of participating versus non-participating women and identifies women as responsible for improving their position. At the same time, gender (in)equality is defined exclusively as a women’s concern. Such discourses, as constitutive practices, produce specific knowledge about rural women and new subjectivities that prescribe and govern them solely as subjects of development. Our research suggests that such a limited discursive practice invisiblises gendered power relations and structural and institutional issues, ultimately slowing progress towards gender equality. We demonstrate the importance of studying policy as discourse, beyond the effectiveness of policies or mainstreaming tools, and call for empirical evidence on the impact of these discourses on women’s subjectivities and lived experiences.

New Food Forestry course – you can now register yourself

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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.

Oil, Resource Frontiers, and Unruly Spaces in Northern Kurdistan

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Zeynep Oguz*

Turkish and Kurdish studies have been moving in important directions in the past decade. Studies of the importance of space and placemaking in Kurdish issue (Gambetti and Jongerden 2015) have been complemented by sustained engagements with material culture, nature, and environments in Kurdistan, as well as how they are central to colonial practices, state violence, and resistance. Today, from the study of ruins and ruination in burial sites and ghosts and, therefore, the interaction between the material and the symbolic, one can learn from anthropological and historical studies of how forests and forest fires, water and rivers, mountains, and animals have been entangled with power and resistance in Kurdistan (See Adalet 2022, Bozcali 2020, Biner 2019, Çaylı 2021, Oguz 2021, Suni 2023).

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Politics of Difference and Land the late Ottoman Empire and French-Syria (1860-1925)

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Seda Altuğ*

The scholarly debates in Ottoman /Kurdish studies regarding the Armenian and Kurdish issues from late 19th century onwards, reveals that the national question is usually viewed as a product of competing nationalisms— that is, political ideologies built around conceptions of communal belonging and statehood. The scholarship on sectarianism in the Arab Middle East, too, despite critical work in the last decade, has been dominated by rather ahistorical and primordial assumptions concerning the relationship between religion, modernity and politics in the Ottoman imperial and (post-Ottoman) colonial contexts.

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