CONGRESS THEMES

Rural areas and people in Europe stand at a crossroads, caught between global and local flows and processes. The ESRS Congress will address this critical moment through the following five key themes:

1. Mobilities and Stabilities in Rural Space
2.The Rural Bites Back
3. Animal Farm
4. The Sciences of the Rural
5. Sustainable Ruralities

1. Mobilities and Stabilities in Rural Space
Rural areas across Europe are experiencing extensive migration flows. EU enlargement and the effects of the Single European Market are accelerating the movement of workers between regions and countries. Small towns and rural areas are attracting migrant labour, not just the cities. At the same time most rural areas continue to lose many of their young people as they move to the cities for higher education and employment. Much of the periphery of Europe – southern Europe, Scandinavia, eastern-Europe – continues to experience net rural depopulation: the outmigration of the young, the educated and the economically active leaving behind declining and ageing communities. Other areas are experiencing counterurbanisation as affluent middle-class people move in, in search of the rural ‘good life’. These forces of labour migration, depopulation and counterurbanisation are differentially transforming the social structure and culture of rural areas. The complexity of flows and contexts produces different local patterns and outcomes: ranging from prosperous, buoyant places afflicted by shortages of affordable housing and access to key services such as schools and elderly care: to ageing and debilitated communities reliant on external support and transfers. To the local/newcomer dynamic may be added age-related, ethnic, class and permanent/temporary residence divides. What are the effects on social cohesion? What social risks and opportunities does migration bring, for the migrants, their families (who do not always move) and for rural communities both in ‘delivering’ and ‘incoming’ regions? How do different ‘welfare models’ found throughout Europe respond to the challenges of migration? Do communities and welfare services show different capacities to cope with and benefit from migration flows?

2. The Rural Bites Back
Much of the literature on the rural presents it as passive space without agency, and even then in decline or retreat. But the rural has power, both as a constituency and as a point of contradiction. While rural power, in the form of some traditional constituencies (e.g. farmers’ unions, the Common Agricultural Policy, agricultural research institutions, the rural working class) may be in relative decline, the power of the rural recurringly reasserts itself. Issues to do with food production and with rural environmental protection preoccupy public debate and popular concern. The rural is also the source of a great deal of chaos and disorder, including occasional outbreaks of flooding, animal diseases, and food scares. More recently, the power of the rural has been demonstrated in the market place in huge hikes in commodity prices, dramatic increases in rural land values and food riots around the world. These recent expressions of the power of the rural provide new opportunities to re-assert or redefine rural power. For example, there has been the re-emergence of concerns about food security and demands for a ‘new productivism’, as well as programmes for bio-energy and more broadly the bio-economy. What have rural academics (whose power may be waxing or waning) to say about this rural resurgence?

3. Animal Farm
Rural areas are arenas in which the changing relationships between society and nature play out in distinctive and mutually reconstitutive ways. The relationships are material and moral ones (e.g. what to eat and how to care for it); corporeal and imagined ones (the disassembling and marketing of animal bodies versus visions of the rural gothic and enchanted creatures); or projects that creatively mix the two, such as biosecurity, rewilding, or the introduction of genetically modified organisms. Key sites for the performance of rural society-nature relationships are farms, animal clinics, livestock markets, abattoirs, laboratories, television and the cinema. The constant churn and exchange of matter and ideas within and between these sites affords creative opportunities and makes demands on the social sciences. There is a need to understand the innovative possibilities of such heterogeneous flows and connections (e.g. the turn to quality in cultures of consumption). The lack of fixity in the rural from this perspective suggests the need for ethical explorations that are more empirical and situated than ideological. Finally, attention needs to be given to ontological politics: the struggles and accommodations, the controversies, interferences and synergies, amongst the multiple worlds being enacted in rural production spaces.

4. The Sciences of the Rural
Rural research is diverse and often involves many disciplines, including non-social sciences. Within the social sciences one question that might be considered is whether there is, can be or should be a specific rural sociology, as opposed to an interdisciplinary rural studies which more fully acknowledges the irreducible spatial, political and economic dimensions of rurality. The challenges of land management in the current era of climate change mitigation and adaptation surely require that an interdisciplinary rural studies extends further into working with the natural and physical sciences. This will require innovative methods for working together, for framing problems and for integrating outputs. Experiments in these areas are already underway across Europe and North America. Natural Scientists should not expect their own ways of working to go unchanged and part of working with them must be studying their practices and understanding the politics inherent in the knowledge they produce. In this process, insights from the field of Science and Technology Studies can be of help, whether through practical intervention or simply through making trouble. The rural social sciences have grown from applied roots in extension services and production modernization programmes, although in recent years many have stepped away from this heritage and introduced a much-needed critical dimension from their wider disciplines. Has this move been at the expense of distancing ourselves from the coalface? In the context outlined above it becomes all the more vital to understand the expertise and performativity of rural social science: the politics it entails and the worlds it enacts through its research. Only through such inquiry can we bring the insights of new critical approaches to bear on processes of social and technical change.

5. Sustainable Ruralities
Concerns around climate change have risen up the political agenda in recent years, alongside growing recognition of the pressure on oil and gas supplies during the transition to a ‘post-carbon economy’. These global issues raise important questions for the future of rural areas, which provide vital environmental functions such as renewable energy generation, waste assimilation, flood mitigation and carbon sequestration. How should rural land be used to secure a sustainable future for the next generation? Where will energy crops be grown, and should the planting of energy crops replace food crops? What can be done to preserve and improve carbon storage systems in fragile peatlands for example? Will much of temperate agriculture move north in Europe, and with what wider consequences? In debates around climate change and ‘sustainable communities’, rural areas are often seen by policy-makers and planners as inherently unsustainable, and as making a proportionately greater negative contribution to climate change per household than urban areas, for example, through higher car ownership and usage. Emphasis has been placed on concentrating housing and other development in existing settlements, but is this at the risk of producing an increasingly socially exclusive countryside? What implications do such policies have for decisions by individuals in rural areas about where they live and work and how they travel? Actors at local and regional levels have responded to these agendas in myriad different ways. What factors shape the attitudes, motivations and behaviours of individuals, businesses and communities in their responses to the climate change agenda? What sources of expertise are being drawn upon in shaping such responses, and how can communities and individuals be effectively consulted and involved in decision-making processes?

On behalf of the scientific Committee,
Philip Lowe