Research at the Rural Sociology Group
The Rural Sociology Group studies agrarian change, food provisioning and rural development in Europe and the Global South.
Our research approach
- Everyday Realities: Our research starts with people's daily lives and practices, examining technology-in-use and interactions with nature and environmental change.
- Dynamics: We link present conditions to historical developments, exploring path dependencies like in/formal rules, vested interests, and long-term financial investments to understand societal connectivities and disjunctures.
- Meaningful Diversity: We focus on how creative agency makes diversity meaningful, studying how human actions in socio-material or socio-natural environments create different development patterns.
- Comparative Research: We compare practices and processes to understand dynamics, contradictions, inequalities, and uneven development, using case studies and qualitative research as core methods.
- Relational Approach: We view rural areas as products of interactions and relations, examining power dynamics, resource mobilization, and actors' ideas to understand the contextual outcomes of social relations.
- Critical and Engaged: We critically analyze mainstream concepts like agricultural modernisation, aiming to defamiliarise and deconstruct the familiar, exploring new practices and alternatives through an engaged or activist research approach.
Our research themes
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Agrarian change
The Rural Sociology Group researches the dynamics of agriculture, including meaningful diversity in farming, the (gendered) organisation of work and labour, the politics of nature-society interaction, land rights and struggles, markets, conflicts around knowledge and technology, and questions of dependency and autonomy.
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Food provisioning
The Rural Sociology Group studies diverse forms of food provisioning and alternative food economies in rural and urban settings, and the role of hopeful critiques of the modernisation, globalisation and industrialisation of food systems.
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Rural development
The Rural Sociology Group studies ongoing transformations of rural areas and underlying power dynamics, contributing to making rural futures more fair and just. RSO therefore explores newly emerging modes of food provisioning, non-food goods and services, and belonging. We study changing social interaction between social movements, scientists, local people, and state and business actors.