Research of Rural Sociology

• Everyday Realities: Our research starts with people's daily lives and practices, examining technology-in-use and interactions with nature and environmental change.
• Dynamics: We link present conditions to historical developments, exploring path dependencies like in/formal rules, vested interests, and long-term financial investments to understand societal connectivities and disjunctures.
• Meaningful Diversity: We focus on how creative agency makes diversity meaningful, studying how human actions in socio-material or socio-natural environments create different development patterns.
• Comparative Research: We compare practices and processes to understand dynamics, contradictions, inequalities, and uneven development, using case studies and qualitative research as core methods.
• Relational Approach: We view rural areas as products of interactions and relations, examining power dynamics, resource mobilization, and actors' ideas to understand the contextual outcomes of social relations.
• Critical and Engaged: We critically analyze mainstream concepts like agricultural modernisation, aiming to defamiliarise and deconstruct the familiar, exploring new practices and alternatives through an engaged or activist research approach.

We host many PhD candidates from different backgrounds. RSO enjoys an outstanding international reputation. As a PhD candidate at RSO, you will be executing your research in one of the domains of RSO. If you are interested in doing a PhD at RSO, please first check the general information on the PhD programme of Wageningen University & Research.

We regularly offer interesting PhD possibilities within (inter)national projects. You can always inquire about the possibilities (contact our research coordinator Joost Jongerden) and keep an eye on our weblog.