Working Group 4.2

Rural Sociology:  Knowledge for Whom?

Convenors:
Karl Bruckmeier, Gothenburg University, karl.bruckmeier@globalstudies.gu.se
Hilary Tovey,Trinity College Dublin, htovey@tcd.ie

To whom is knowledge from sociological research addressed?  How is it transferred, how is it used and by whom, for what purposes?   This Working Group examines the different relations between rural sociology and those who receive or are addressed by its research, including scientific and social-scientific publics, political and administrative publics, the public ‘in general’, and specific rural groups.  Michael Burawoy has argued that there are varieties of sociology in practice (professional, critical, policy…) and that contemporary sociology needs to re-invent itself in its ‘public’ variety:  can or should rural sociology be a ‘public sociology’ in this sense?  The call to practice ‘public sociology’ raises key questions about the values and normative orientations of sociological research, the relations between sociologists and others with an interest (scientific, developmental, regulatory and so on) in the ‘rural field’, the social groups who might be considered key clients for sociological knowledge, the theory and practice of constructing knowledge of the social world.  Similar questions are being posed in recent years in other rural-related disciplines, as for example with the development of ‘public ecology’ as a set of practices for managing natural resources underpinned by some key developments in the theorising of ecological and socio-natural systems.

The Working Group will offer an occasion to reflect on the achievements, failures, and possibilities of rural sociology as a distinctive body of knowledge about the rural, and an opportunity to critically explore relations between sociological and other bodies of knowledge about the rural: rural social organisation and change, rural natural resources, rural-urban relations and so on. We therefore welcome papers which critically address one or more of the following themes:
-  sociological knowledge of the rural:  knowledge for whom? 
-  relations between rural sociology and neighbouring sociological areas of
research (sociologies of modernity, of capitalist development, of
society-nature relations, urban sociology etc:  can rural sociology contribute to
wider theorisation of society, the social, and the socio-natural?)
-  how does and how should rural sociological research respond to policy and
   planning analyses and discourses for rural development?  Or to normative
   discourses such as that of ‘sustainable development’? Or to the projects and
   knowledges of NGOs and social movements working for change within rural
   localities?
- working in an interdisciplinary way (with other social sciences - history,
geography, economics, social ecology – and with natural sciences):  how does
 this and how should it challenge sociological research practices and
 understandings of the rural?
- sociological research and its interaction with non-scientific knowledge from
  lifeworld contexts - situated, lay and local knowledges of rural actors;  the
  transdisciplinarity discourse and its relevance for rural sociology.