Several simultaneous developments force us to reconsider our place as humans in nature, on this globe and in this world. The anthropocentric outlook, in which we see humans as central to knowing and transforming the world, seems more and more a recipe for disaster. The globally influential philosopher Rosi Braidotti has for many years theorized […]
The PhD course Agrarian and Food Citizenship gives participants an opportunity to intensively engage with some of the major debates about the democratization of our agricultural and food practices, so that they can continue to explore and expand these debates in their own research. The main analytical lens to this democratization of agriculture and food […]
Join us for CONVIVIALITY October 4-9, 2021 Have you heard there is an exciting all-virtual, all-free, all-asynchronous experimental conference taking place October 4-9, 2021, organized by Wageningen University and Massey University Political Ecology Research Centre? CONVIVIALITY brings us together to ask, “How can we live – not at the expense of others?” Together, we will explore predicaments of agriculture, biodiversity, […]
We kindly invite you to attend the PhD Defence of Lisa Trogisch on October 4 at 4:00 pm (CET). Lisa will defend her thesis entitled: “Geographies of fear. Exploring the transboundary nature of conservation and conflict among the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Uganda”. It will be held online. You can join via: https://weblectures.wur.nl/P2G/Player/Player.aspx?id=aulatv
We kindly invite you to attend the PhD Defence of Lerato Thakholi on October 1 at 11:00 am (CET). Lerato will defend her thesis entitled: “Conserving Inequality: Subjugating black labour by accumulating and defending property in South Africa’s private nature reserves”. It will be held online. You can join via: https://weblectures.wur.nl/P2G/Player/Player.aspx?id=aulatv
The 8th International Degrowth conference: Caring communities for radical change (August 24-28, 2021, the Hague) has just wrapped up. Several CSPS members, Robert Fletcher (SDC), Thomas Kiggell (SDC), Oona Morrow (RSO), Chizu Sato (GEO), and Lucie Sovová (RSO), participated as organizing team members, session organizers, and/or volunteers. The themes covered in the conference were exciting. […]
Curious to know who we are and what we do as a Centre? Watch our new video, with great animations from Scratch Graphics! Produced in preparation for our upcoming Peer Review on September 8th, 2021.
Introduction We are delighted to announce our PhD course on agrarian and food citizenship. The course gives participants an opportunity to intensively engage with some of the major debates and approaches on the democratization of our agricultural and food systems so that they can continue to explore and expand these in their own research. The […]
Mundane normativity and the everyday handling of contested food consumption by prof. Bente Halkier, University of Copenhagen, August 30, 16.00-17.30 (CET): “Food in everyday life is contested from multiple kinds of public debates in present societies such as climate, health, risk, environment and quality, which point to food consumption in everyday life as a site of […]
The WASS course, Critical Gender Studies in the Life Sciences domains – WUR, is now online and registration is open! Today, research in the life sciences done to support sustainable development is increasingly interdisciplinary and demands better understanding of roles of gender and other differences, such as race and colonial history. This course directly enables […]
The Rural Sociology Group of Wageningen University will celebrate its 75th Anniversary on the 13th of May 2022. Over the 75 years of the Group’s existence, characteristic features of the “Wageningen School” approach in rural sociology have been its comparative research, empirically grounded theoretical development, and a research output renowned for its scientific as well as for […]
Since the start of 2020, the Coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we think and use public outdoor spaces. Repeated lockdowns and social distancing are now part of our daily lives. But what does it mean for the design of these places going forward? This symposium intends to highlight current research pathways, perspectives and practices […]
In “Does the Arab region have an agrarian question?” Max Ajl argues that the Arab region is not part of broader discussions on the agrarian question and even though the political economy is having a small renaissance in Arab region studies, the leading agrarian publications – Journal of Peasant Studies, Agrarian South, Journal of Agrarian Change, Agriculture and Human […]
Antipode has long published radical geographical scholarship on Palestine/Israel. In this virtual issue, several articles, amongst them one written by Alexandra Rijke en Claudio Minca, are made available to a wider audience in support of those scholars and activists who witness, live with, and resist the ongoing occupation and Israeli apartheid, and those who stand in […]
The idea of a Green New Deal, a set of proposal to address climate change and its effects, was launched into popular consciousness by US Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018. Evocative of the far-reaching ambitions of its namesake, it has become a watchword in the current era of global climate crisis. But what – and […]
Glenn Albrecht is a transdisciplinary philosopher who is internationally renowned for coining the neologism ‘Solastalgia’ – a form of existential suffering experienced by those living in places subjected to physical desolation.
June 1 2021, at 11.00 am (CET) Angela Moriggi will defend her PhD-thesis ‘Green Care practices and place-based sustainability transformations: A participatory action-oriented study in Finland‘. See the Abstract below. The full thesis can be downloaded from the WUR Library after the defense ceremony, or by clicking its DOI. The ceremony will be live-streamed by Weblectures.wur.nl, but […]
The majority of this blog post, written by Jessica Duncan and Priscilla Claeys, was originally posted on the Agroecology Now! Blog as Failure to Engage: Civil Society Marginalized in UN Food Summit If sociology can be broadly defined as the study of social life, social change and consequences, it should not be surprising that many sociologists […]
In 2021, Dominic Ongwen, a leader of the notorious Ugandan armed group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) was found guilty of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC). In early May, Ongwen was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The trial, the verdict and the sentence have been subject of much controversy. The […]
Wow, it’s been a looooong year. And many of us are feeling pretty damn weary by now. So, how about we take a pause together? For the May edition of the Transformative Learning (TL) Hub, we’ll draw on the invitation from the folks at Year Compass to ‘Learn from your mistakes, celebrate your victories, and […]
On Tuesday April 27, prof. Edward H. Huijbens, chair of the Cultural Geography Group at WUR, published a book on earthly attachments in the Anthropocene. Developing Earthly Attachments in the Anthropocene examines the ways in which the Earth has become a source of political, social, and cultural theory in times of global climate change. The book […]
Registration Zoom registration (required): https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_mM3-DL-zRtSwOtgki14t1A YouTube live stream: https://youtu.be/Tt3qd-ggclM Description The Centre for Space Place and Society (CSPS) proudly presents Séverine Autesserre as the 2021 speaker for our annual lecture. She is an award-winning scholar, currently a professor in Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University in New York. Prof. Autesserre is a prominent voice […]
In the Webinar 3 of the 75th Anniversary Rural Sociology Series we are pleased to present two presentations addressing the research theme ‘migrant labour in agriculture’. Deniz Duruiz, Northwestern University:Kurdishness, Race-Making, and Political Subjectivity on Turkish Farms Seth Holmes, UC Berkeley:The Extended Time and Space of Migrant Farmworker Injury: Indigenous Mexican Farmworkers in the USA […]
This talk is concerned with the role for agri-environmental social sciences in understanding the new human condition called by some “the Anthropocene”, and what I increasingly think of as the challenge of living with Gaia. How have we become so lost that our most fundamental relationship with the environment, food getting, has come to undermine […]
Today, Tuesday April 6 2021, is ‘Alarm Day’; a day on which the teaching and research staff, students, administrators and alumni of all 14 Dutch research universities will be congregating to call on the new government to structurally invest 1.1 billion euros in academic research and education. Since 2000 student numbers have doubled, while government […]
The Conviviality conference is co-hosted by the Massey University Political Ecology Research Centre (PERC) and the Wageningen University Centre for Space, Place and Society (CSPS). The virtual conference will be from June 1-7, 2021. When interested to participate, please send a 250 word abstract with your name, e-mail address, and affiliation to masseyPERC@gmail.com by Monday, April 5, 2021. Proposals for panels and (digital) […]
In this Short Symposium Claudio Minca, Alexandra Rijke, Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Martina Tazzioli, Darshan Vigneswaran, Henk van Houtum and Annelies van Uden reflect upon the growing relevance of biopolitical perspectives in camp studies, border studies, refugee studies and specifically in research at the intersection between mobility studies and political geography. This Symposium is the outcome of […]
Growing pressures on natural resources –related to land and water grabbing and climate change-feed into concerns over natural resource conflict worldwide, making this a core issue in development studies today. Dominant paradigms frame the resource-conflict nexus in terms of scarcity, employing some form of causal reasoning. This course unpacks and critiques this reasoning, introducing a […]
In the face of urgent environmental and societal challenges, how do we move towards inclusive futures? What is the role of people in places? And what can be our role as (social) scientists?
In this course, we explore inclusive place-based approaches to development.
OtherWise, a WUR critical student organization, is launching a third edition of the Alternative Research Methods Training on 8th-12th February. This extracurricular course is aimed at MSc students curious about diverse approaches to research. This time, the focus will be on doing research remotely. Course description How to conduct research in a world that is […]