Research at the Rural Sociology Group
The Rural Sociology Group studies agrarian change, food provisioning and rural development in Europe and the Global South.
Our research approach
- 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.
Our research themes
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Agrarian change
The Rural Sociology Group aims to understand, explain, and influence the roots and implications of the intertwined social and environmental crises of our times, and of their alternatives, for agrarian communities, agricultural practices, and rural life.
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Food provisioning
The Rural Sociology Group studies diverse forms of food provisioning, alternative food economies, and food governance in rural and urban settings. Recognising the diversity of food production systems, we investigate the ways in which food is produced, distributed, consumed, and governed in place-based contexts. Examples include studies on food-sharing networks, urban gardens and food aid in diverse geographical and political contexts like the Netherlands, Eastern and Western Europe and sub-Saharan Africa. Within these explorations, we approach food as a site of complex social meanings, cultural traditions, social-economic relations and political contestations. Our work addresses critiques of the modernisation, globalisation and industrialisation of food systems, and explores alternative pathways.
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Rural development
One of the key research challenges today is understanding the future of rural areas in an increasingly urbanized society. Many fear that unceasing urbanisation will concur with the decline and depopulation of rural areas, which will impair the quality of life of rural residents. However, rural-urban mobilities and interactions take many forms, including various forms of counter-urbanization. Moreover, we continue to depend on rural areas for many basic needs including food, fresh air and clean water, but also sustainable energy, housing and recreation. Last but not least rural areas continue to serve as markers of identity and belonging across the world. More insight into rural futures and the preconditions for realising sustainable and inclusive countrysides is, hence, important.