Postdoctoral Working Group - "Rural Futures"

Summer Term 2019, starting May 2019

organized and hosted by Dr. Amiel Bize, University of Bayreuth

How might we rethink the “agrarian question” today? How does advanced capitalism in its globalized, financialized form penetrate and reshape agrarian (and post-agrarian) life? And in this context, how do we approach the categories that scholars have used for describing and analyzing “the rural”? This working group seeks to look beyond the presumption that urban spaces are at the forefront of global change and to instead examine how “rural futures” are at once entangled with global changes and persistently marginalized by them. Through a reading group and a series of public events, we will examine transformations taking place in rural spaces, while simultaneously asking how “the rural” and associated concepts operate as analytic categories today.