Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World

Project Information

RURALIMAGINATIONS

Grant agreement ID: 772436

DOI

10.3030/772436

Project closed

EC signature date 10 April 2018

Start date 1 September 2018

End date 30 June 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 000 000,00

EU contribution

€ 2 000 000,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - RURALIMAGINATIONS (Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World)

Reporting period: 2023-03-01 to 2024-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

RURALIMAGINATIONS compares the crucial role played by popular novels, films and television series in determining what aspects of the contemporary globalized rural do and do not become socially visible – and how this affects political mobilizations of the rural in the UK, the US, the Netherlands, South Africa and China. This is important in view of worldwide concerns about growing rural-urban divides. By analyzing, from a humanities perspective, how popular cultural imaginations of the rural influence how people in- and outside the rural believe it should look and feel, we supplement the sociological approaches that have dominated the field of rural studies. We ask:
1) To what extent do cultural imaginations render globalization’s effects on the rural (in)visible?
2) What role do traditional rural genres like the idyll and the feelings and desires they attach to the rural play in this making (in)visible?
3) How can new aesthetic repertoires highlighting the rural as a dynamic site of globalization and addressing growing rural-urban divides be developed?
Our findings show that, across the five contexts, although each has distinct traditions of imagining the rural, many cultural imaginations portray the rural as a refuge from globalization, keeping its undeniable reshaping of the rural off the page and screen. An important reason for this, we concluded, is that the idyll and pastoral - as no longer specifically western genres but globally influential - remain the dominant lenses for perceiving the rural. New aesthetic repertoires that transform these genres can, however, be discerned in some cultural imaginations. In addition, a truly new imagination of the rural as deeply globalized - and not diametrically opposed to the urban – emerges in the notion of the hinterland as connecting those rural and urban locations providing the global economy with natural resources, logistics and labor. Popular imaginations conceiving of the rural as hinterland, we have shown, can explain and challenge the appeal of nationalist mobilizations of the rural seeking to romanticize it and downplay its role in global capitalism's destructive dimensions.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

With regard to our research questions, we established that although in all five contexts many popular cultural imaginations still present the rural through idyllic and pastoral genres, others thematize their inadequacy to globalized rural realities and the detrimental effects of the strong affective attachment many people feel to them. Yet others go even further by invoking the hinterland or reconfiguring the idyll and pastoral in post/decolonial, posthuman and queer veins. In this way, the rural’s haunting by the afterlives of coloniality, its imbrication with patriarchal and heteronormative power structures, and its status as a more-than-human realm are revealed.
We realized our two main objectives of expanding the field of rural studies (dominated by the social sciences) to the humanities and establishing durable collaborations between social scientists and humanities scholars by including researchers with humanities and social science backgrounds in the research team, in the workshops and events we organized, and in our publications, most notably the edited volume Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment and Care (Palgrave 2024), with 18 contributions from social scientists and humanities scholars, and the forthcoming edited volume Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World (Brill 2025), with 25 contributions from social scientists, humanities scholars and artists. That our findings were recognized as relevant and innovative beyond the humanities is clear from their publication in social science-focused journals like the Journal of Rural Studies, the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Social Dynamics, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences and the Journal of Architecture. The PI was also the only humanities scholar on the Scientific Committee for the XXIXth European Society for Rural Sociology Congress.
Besides scholars from different disciplines, the project involved artists and cultural producers. In 2019, four members of the research team attended the Rural Assembly at London's Whitechapel Gallery, where they met Wapke Feenstra, co-founder of the rural-focused artist collective MyVillages. This led to a long-term collaboration: Feenstra presented at the project launch; invited members of the research team to participate in a public event at TENT Arts Center during her Farmers’ Side exposition; presented a film at our project conference in Amsterdam and wrote a chapter for the Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World volume. Novelists Cynan Jones and Caryl Lewis and a location manager for rural television series (including the popular Welsh series Hinterland) participated in the expert workshop in Aberystwyth; filmmaker Adam James Smith premiered a film at the workshop in New York; and at the workshop in Beijing LIANG Junjian presented on his filmmaking workshop at Tsinghua University, which has produced award-winning rural documentaries.
In an unforeseen result, the project drew attention from stakeholders. With Peter van Dam, a historian of sustainability, the PI wrote a chapter on how Dutch productivist farmers position themselves in debates about the environment after being invited by Amsterdam Green Campus – a non-profit foundation connecting government, business and higher education – to consult on a survey of farmers commissioned by the municipality of Hollands Kroon. The chapter, which will be part of the Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World volume, was presented to representatives of the Provinces of North Holland and Flevoland, and the Land and Horticulture Organisation Netherlands (LTO). The PI was also invited by the Council for the Environment and Infrastructure, a strategic advisory board for the Dutch government, as external referent for the report Farming with a Future, presented to the Minister of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality in 2021.
The project’s findings have been published in peer-reviewed journals and books, presented at conferences and workshops around the world (insofar as the Covid pandemic allowed), and disseminated through public events, podcasts, book launches and interviews in Dutch newspapers (Trouw, Volkskrant) and magazines (De Groene Amsterdammer, Televisier.nl) and on the radio.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The Planetary Hinterlands volume makes significant progress beyond the state of the art in understanding why rural globalization continues to be overlooked. In it, the concept of the hinterland, not much used outside transport geography, is taken up by scholars across the humanities and social sciences, and across the Global North and South, to rethink globalization as unfolding across rural, urban and wilderness spaces and to rethink the hinterland as involving material and affective dimensions, and as located not just on land but also on water.
Other publications go beyond the state of the art in thinking the genres of the idyll and pastoral by highlighting the role affective attachments play in their lasting and by now global appeal (Peeren/Souch in Journal of Rural Studies; Stuit in Social Dynamics; Bosma and Valdés Olmos in their PhD dissertations) and the way this appeal is mobilized in the service of (populist) nationalism (Bosma/Peeren in Politics and Policies of Rural Authenticity; Tavakoli Farsooni in Journal of British Cinema and Television).