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.
