Periodic Reporting for period 3 - RURALIMAGINATIONS (Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World)
Reporting period: 2021-09-01 to 2023-02-28
Our three central research questions are:
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?
The project proposes that the detailed analysis of the form and content of prominent cultural imaginations of the rural is a vital addition to looking at what is actually happening in rural areas because such imaginations influence how people, both inside and outside the rural, make sense of it and its relation to globalization. The project is unique in comparing five national contexts across four continents – the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands, China and South Africa – and in examining, in the project synthesis, how certain rural imaginations have themselves achieved global reach.
1) The research team was recruited, consolidated and expanded. The PI (Esther Peeren) recruited two postdocs (Emily Ng, China subproject; Hanneke Stuit, South Africa subproject), three PhDs (Anke Bosma, Netherlands subproject; Lelia Tavakoli Farsooni, UK subproject; Tjalling Valdés Olmos, US subproject), four research assistants (Zaza de Ridder, 2019-2020; Calvin Duggan, 2020-2021; Ayumi Fillipone, 2020-2021; Erick Fowler, 2022-2023). Two self-funded PhDs (Shao SHAO and Chen ZHOU, both working on rural imaginations in China) are affiliated with the project.
2) With regard to the research questions, we established that in all five national contexts many prominent cultural imaginations still present the rural through idyllic/pastoral genres. At the same time, some prominent cultural imaginations thematize these genres' inadequacy to rural reality, as well as the detrimental effects of people’s lingering affective attachment to them. In critiquing these effects, some cultural imaginations of the rural suggest reconfigurations of the idyll/pastoral, notably in decolonial and posthuman veins.
3) We expanded the theoretical framework by engaging with post- and decolonial theories (to grasp how many cultural imaginations of the rural ignore the afterlives of coloniality haunting the rural) and by exploring how the rural is being reimagined through posthuman frameworks.
4) One of the project's main objectives is to expand the field of rural studies to the humanities and to set up durable collaborations between social scientists and humanities scholars. Important steps have been taken towards this aim. The research team includes researchers with humanities and social science backgrounds, and so have all the project events. That our interdisciplinary approach has gained recognition is evidenced by the fact that two articles co-authored by Peeren were published in the Journal of Rural Studies, a top journal that predominantly features social, economic and natural scientists.
5) We have actively involved artists and cultural producers in the project. Two examples: 1) In June 2019, Peeren, Stuit, Ng and Tavakoli Farsooni attended the Rural Assembly at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, which coincided with an exhibition of the artist collective MyVillages. Wapke Feenstra, a member of MyVillages, gave a presentation at the RURALIMAGINATIONS project launch in June 2019, involved us in a public event at TENT Arts Center in Rotterdam related to her exposition Boerenzij (Farmers’ Side) in December 2019, and presented a video work at the Project Conference in August 2022; 2) The international expert meeting in Aberystwyth (November 2019) featured a panel discussion between two novelists and a location manager involved in the BBC series Hinterland.
6) The project has attracted attention from rural stakeholders. At the December 2020 online workshop on “The Self-Image and Public Image of Dutch Farmers and the Politics of the Rural,” Esther Peeren and Peter van Dam, a historian of sustainability, presented an article-in-progress “Scales of Sustainability: Redefining the Position of Productivist Farmers in Debates about the Environment,” conceived after Peeren and Van Dam were invited by Amsterdam Green Campus – a non-profit foundation at the University of Amsterdam that connects government, business and higher education – to consult on a study of agrarians commissioned by the municipality of Hollands Kroon. In November 2020, a virtual roundtable was organized by AGC to discuss the article with scholars from the social and natural sciences. It will be published in the edited volume coming out of the Project Conference.
7) The project’s findings have been published in academic journals and presented in academic institutions, through keynotes, invited lectures and conference presentations. Results were also disseminated through public events. To give some examples: Valdés Olmos contributed to a discussion about the documentary Americaville organized by Pakhuis de Zwijger Amsterdam; Bosma participated in a podcast about cinematic depictions of European countrysides for Pod Academy, and Peeren was cited in an article on cottagecore in the Dutch national newspaper Trouw.
8) We launched a project website: http://www.ruralimaginations.com.