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. […]
Kakuma refugee camp in Northern Kenya is emblematic for the debate about the ambiguous phenomenon of the protracted refugee camp. This can be depicted as both an emergency measure with its perils and plight on the one hand, and its longevity, development and normalisation on the other. With its origin in 1992, located in the […]
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 […]
In this article Alexandra Rijke analyses the latest relaunch of Checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem as an expression of a specific ‘present checkpoint future’: in which the checkpoint’s arbitrariness and it’s ‘legitimised façade’ are intrinsically bound and an expression of the same violent future: a future with an enduring Israeli military regime in the Occupied Palestinian […]
The WHO European Centre for Environment and Health has been closely following the research on green and blue spaces because of their importance in addressing human and ecosystem health in urban planning, especially in the context of climate change. Particular attention has been paid to the mental health effects of such spaces. The EKLIPSE Expert Working […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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).
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 […]
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) […]
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 […]
Centre for Space, Place and Society 