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 […]
Announcement | PhD Defence Donya Madjdian | “Nourishing Hope. Adolescent Nutrition and Aspirations in Nepal”
August 10, 2021 On the 10th of September 2021 Donya Madjdian will defend her PhD thesis entitled: “Nourishing Hope. Adolescent Nutrition and Aspirations in Nepal”! Due to the current COVID-19 measures and the uncertainty around the situation in September, the defence will be livestreamed and you are most welcome to follow the ceremony on Friday 10 […]
PhD Course | Critical Gender Studies in the Life Sciences domains| Tue 14 September 2021 until Tue 19 October 2021
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 […]
Webinars | Section for Human-Primate Interactions | With Christine Ampumuza
Our Summer Series of Webinars starts Tuesday 13th July at 9am GMT We have a great line up of speakers to discuss the effects of habituation on primates and its alternatives. The webinar is free to attend and will be via Zoom.Email us at shpiwebinars@gmail.com to receive a link enabling you to access the live webinar We are very […]
Event | 75th Anniversary Rural Sociology: Past, Present and Future | May 13, 2022
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 […]
Symposium | Public outdoor spaces and Covid-19 | June 24 -25, 2021, online
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 […]
Publication| Does the Arab region have an agrarian question? | by Max Ajl
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 […]
Blog | Tackling the health gap together | By: Laura Bouwman
It is a harsh reality. People on low incomes and with a low education are more likely to be ill, receive less good care when they are ill and have considerably fewer healthy years of life than people who have more money and a better education. The fact that this is the case in countries […]
Publication | Antipode Virtual Issue on Israel/Palestine | with contributions from Alexandra Rijke and Claudio Minca
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 […]
Publication | A People’s Green New Deal | by Max Ajl
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 […]
Public lecture | The need for new concepts in understanding and responding to our Earth crisis | with Dr. Glenn Albrecht | Friday May 28th, 10.00 -11.30 CET | registration required
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.
PhD Defense | Green Care practices and place-based sustainability transformations: a participatory action-oriented study in Finland | by Angela Moriggi
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 […]
Blog | Engaged scholarship: Why the UN Food System Summit has failed to engaged civil society
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 […]
Public lecture | Making peace with the Lord’s Resistance Army? Why peace processes fail | By Dr. Mareike Schomerus | Thursday May 27 , 15.30 -17.00 CET | Online
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 […]
Event | Transformative Learning Hub | Pause. Reflect. Envision | May 12, 2021 from 9.30 – 12.30 CET | Online
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 […]
Publication| Developing Earthly Attachments in the Anthropocene | by Edward Huijbens
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 […]
CSPS Annual Lecture | The Frontlines of Peace | with prof. Séverine Autesserre | 8 June 2021, 4 – 5.30 PM (CEST) | Online
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 […]
Webinar | Migrant labour in agriculture | Wednesday 19th May 2021, 15:00-17:00 (CET)
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 […]
Webinar | Towards a Gaian agriculture | by Dr Anna Krzywoszynska | 28th Apr, 15.00 CET
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 […]
Blog | Why I support Alarm Day and the call for a 1.1 billion Euro structural investment in academic research and education | by prof. Han Wiskerke
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 […]
Event | Water Politics Week | 17-21 May, 2021
Water Politics Week The Water Politics Week offers public lectures by renowned scholars on water politics, and a PhD/Master course, all in the week of 17-21 May 2021! The Water Politics week will take place in an on-line format. Organized by: Sociology of Development and Change (SDC), Public Administration and Policy (PAP), Water Resources Management (WRM).
New paper | ‘Beyond multicultural “tolerance”: guided tours and guidebooks as transformative tools for civic learning’. | By Meghann Ormond, et al.
An article co-authored by our associate professor in Cultural Geography Meghann Ormond was published in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism: ‘Beyond multicultural “tolerance”: guided tours and guidebooks as transformative tools for civic learning’. The article is part of the Roots Guide project (https://www.instagram.com/rootsguide); a participatory action research project where diverse people with migration backgrounds are […]
Event | Conviviality virtual conference June 1-7, 2021 – Call for abstracts
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) […]
Paper | The productive role of innovation in a large tourism organisation (TUI) | By By Harald Buijtendijk, Joost van Heiningen and Martijn Duineveld
New paper | The productive role of innovation in a large tourism organisation (TUI) | By Harald Buijtendijk, Joost van Heiningen and Martijn Duineveld | We studied the development of an innovation unit within TUI, a corporate tour operator. We found that actors interpreted innovation in different ways and that initially the innovation unit was considered a […]
Publication | Rethinking the biopolitical: Borders, refugees, mobilities… | by Alexandra Rijke, et al.
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 […]
WASS/ CSPS PhD course| ‘Early Spring’ School | Natural Resources and Conflict: Violence, Resistance and the State |Special Online Edition | March 1 -10, 2021
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 […]
MSc Course | A Global Sense of Place | March – April 2021, period 5
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.
Course | Alternative Research Methods: Remote Edition | 8 – 12 February 2021
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 […]
Blog | Foodscapes in times of uncertainty #3 | The resilience of food banks during the COVID-19 pandemic
Members of the foodscapes cluster supervise a number of students who are looking at changing foodscapes in times of corona. We therefore introduce a blog series in which these students can share their work. This third blog is written by Paulien Dekkinga. Currently, the world faces a COVID-19 pandemic with many consequences in all parts of society. COVID-19 […]
Blog | Anti-Oppression Reading Group | White Innocence
On Thursday the 19th of November CSPS colleagues and friends met to discuss Gloria Wekker’s White Innocence. This was the second meeting in a series of reading groups organized by Dr. Sierra Deutsch with the CSPS Political Ecology research cluster. The mix of Dutch and international participants felt a lot of resonance with Wekker’s reading […]