About the group
Rural areas are crucial to a whole range of contemporary sustainability challenges. Food and energy production, resource extraction, disease control, climate policies and nature conservation all depend on rural land, labour and ecologies. Yet rural worlds are far from passive recipients of agendas from the outside, and their futures are actively made and remade through contestations between various socio-political forces.
We study rural futures as relational, shaped both by people living in rural places and by political and economic processes and actors. Our work is rooted in the vibrant field of agrarian studies, but our group is not defined by one discipline or tradition, as we welcome scholars working across the social and natural sciences.
Our work is driven by the enduring challenge of developing theory and methods that both inform, and are informed by, rigorous empirical research. Theory is crucial for holding together the specificity of rural worlds and the wider forces that remake them. People in rural areas make their own futures, but under historical and geographical conditions not of their own choosing.
Current research involving our group ranges from the political economy of food systems and rural landscapes to ethnographic inquiries and wildlife ecology, with empirical research in diverse settings from Scandinavia to India and Latin America.
