RURALITY AND FUTURE-MAKING Comparative Perspectives from Europe, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean
This conference brings together three GAA regional working groups – Anthropology of Europe, the Middle East and the Mediterranean – to explore rurality as a reserve and resource for future-making in their interconnected and transnational regionalities. It invites participants to explore situated practices of future-making in order to trace how rurality is achieved, marked and (de-)stabilized in different places. Through concrete ethnographic case studies, we aim at conceptualizing the ‘rural’ beyond well- known center-periphery dichotomies.
Research topics and questions for the conference may entail:
● How and for whom does the rural/hinterland/landscape figure to be a meaningful space of social relations and livelihoods?
● The ‘rural’ as backdrop for processes of globalization or the recursive rural impact on globalization
● What are spatial and power implications of the Mediterranean as an imaginary category?
● What are the perceptions of “rural Europe” and what kind of histories and future-making imaginaries do they imply?
● The ‘mediatized Mediterranean’: rurality, infrastructures and media
● How can we conceptualize local/global, rural/urban and periphery/center binaries in a more productive way?
● The ‘rural’ in development practice and discourse and in changing modernization narratives
● Migration and other rural (im-)mobilities?
● Rurality, Scale and Migration
● Rethinking the ‘rural’ with reference to Horden/Purcell’s historical ecology and its defining features of rupture and connectivity
● The ‘rural’ as cultural identity and heritage – the entrepreneurial potential and imaginary for ‘the touristic gaze’