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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In the November 2020 gathering of the Transformative Learning Hub, we focused on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Climate Change. Two Hub members, Robin van der Sluijs and Dave Pendle, kindly volunteered to lead this session and share their knowledge, experience and practice. Together we explored different ways of engaging with climate change and […]
Advanced Qualitative Research Design and Data Collection (GEO 56806) offers PhD candidates and advanced master’s students enrolled in the graduate programme: A fuller grasp of the analytical value of a range of qualitative methods relative to your own project’s research questions and epistemological/theoretical positioning The knowledge required to identify different methods’ particular logistical requirements and […]
The Transformative Power of Gardening: food literacy, connection and environmentally sustainable choices during COVID-19 By Jessica Breslau and Sofie de Wit Sparked by the covid19 pandemic food supply chains have been disrupted: food is more scarce, expensive, and difficult to access than before (OECD, June 2, 2020). Simultaneously, the pandemic has increased the number of […]
Members of the foodscapes cluster supervise a number of students who are looking at changing food(scapes) in times of corona. We therefore introduce a blog series in which these students can share their work. This first blog is written by Lisa Marijke van den Berg. How COVID-19 changed consumers’ motivations for local consumption Since the declaration […]
We cordially invite you to participate in this exciting online four-part series on Human-Wildlife Interactions! PurposeThe purpose of the series is to facilitate cross-campus conversations and collaborations at WUR on human-wildlife interactions (HWIs) as they relate to broader issues of biodiversity loss and transformative change. Throughout the series we will explore how people at WUR […]
This PhD course gives participants an opportunity to intensively engage with some of the major foundational movements in critical social theory, so that they can continue to explore contemporary expansions of those movements in their own research. It is organized as an intensive discussion seminar over the course of four weeks (with two 3-hour sessions/week). […]
The health of socially vulnerable families can benefit enormously from approaches that take differences within this group into account. Those are the findings of an overall evaluation study of the programme Healthy Futures Nearby, run by Dutch charity fund FNO to increase opportunities for socially vulnerable families. The study has also revealed that the programme […]
Transformative & Participatory Qualitative Research Approaches & Methods provides PhD candidates and early-career scholars conceptual and hands-on methodological engagement with transformative, participatory and action research approaches that use creative and arts-based research methods and techniques to foster the inclusion and engagement of diverse, often marginalised perspectives and to bring into focus, examine and transform narratives, […]
The focus for the 28 October 2020 Transformative Learning Hub gathering was how to engage with anti-oppression in our research, teaching and societal engagement. Why Anti-Oppression? Prompted by the murder on George Floyd and the global growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, a dialogue with colleagues at CSPS resulted in the decision to adopt […]
𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐝𝐨𝐞𝐬 ‘𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐦’ 𝐚𝐧𝐝 ‘𝐛𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐭’ 𝐦𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐜? What are the challenges activists and marginalised groups face? How do Covid-19 restrictions deepen and disclose existing inequalities and injustices? How do physical distancing and quarantine life shape, limit and open up new avenues for activism and resistance? These questions are central […]
The 2020 CSPS Annual Day was held online on 8 October 2020. The interactive session was organised around the metaphor of trees growing together in a forest. Imagine for a moment each CSPS member as an individual ‘tree’ within the broader CSPS and WUR ‘forest’, a superorganism of sorts in which we together grow, adapt […]
De wetenschapswinkel van Wageningen Universiteit en Research nodigt je uit voor de online conferentie ‘Onderwijs op de Zorgboerderij’ op 25 november 2020. Op woensdag 25 november van 15.00 tot 16.30 vindt de online conferentie ‘Onderwijs op de Zorgboerderij’ plaats. Met ondersteuning van de wetenschapswinkel van Wageningen Universiteit en Research is door Roald Pijpker en Esther […]
One of teaching’s key objectives is to nurture students’ growth into active and informed citizens and changemakers, equipped with knowledge, skills and attitudes that enable them to creatively and critically respond to the complex challenges of our times. Yet many of our teaching practices in the realm of higher education are outdated, too often focusing […]
The Transformative Learning Hub (TL Hub) seeks to blur the boundaries conventionally drawn between research and teaching. Organised as a horizontal community of learners, it expressly brings together researchers, educators, students, changemakers and activists across different disciplines and fields at Wageningen University and beyond who are committed to engaging with transformative learning theory and practices […]
To kick off the CSPS Year of Anti-Oppression the Political Ecology reading group met on October 15th to discuss Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism. Nine people attended the reading group from within and beyond CSPS, which signals a growing interest and commitment to exploring this topic together. Dr. Sierra Deutsch facilitated our meeting with the following ground […]
In Bukavu, a rapidly growing city in the troubled east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, neither claimants of land nor claimants of authority can solely rely on one identity or institution in order to secure their claims. Lasting recognition of claims requires constant renegotiation across a shifting diversity of competing individuals and their practices; […]
In an increasing multicultural society, the stories we tell of the past can bring us together or push us further apart. Through travel and tourism we encounter new cultures and perspectives on such stories of the past in certain places. The stories of slavery as told through slavery heritage tourism, is not merely ready-made but […]
How do urban gardens work as sources of food? That is, in a nutshell, the central question of this thesis. Urban gardening and other food alternatives have received growing attention in relation to issues such as food quality and the environmental impacts of food production. However, we know little about how urban gardens actually provide […]