News

Carceral Worlds: Legacies, Textures and Futures, co-edited by Hanneke Stuit

We live a world in which the number of prisons is growing and experiences of incarceration are increasingly widespread. Carceral Worlds, published in August 2024 and edited by Hanneke Stuit, Jennifer Turner and Julienne Weegels, offers a necessary and timely contribution to understanding these carceral realities of the globalized present. The book asks how the carceral has become so central in life, how it manifests in different geographical locations and, finally, what the likely consequences are of living in such a carceral world.

Carceral Worlds focuses on carceral practices, experiences and imaginaries that reach far beyond traditional spaces of confinement. It shows the lasting effects of colonial carceral heritage, the influence of prison systems on city management, and the entrapping nature of digital infrastructures. It also discusses new urbanized forms of migrant detention, the relation between prisons and homelessness, the use of carceral metaphors in the everyday, and the carceral implications of the uneven distribution of climate risk across the globe.

More information about the book can be found here.

IABR 2024 - Nature of Hope Exhibition @ Nieuwe Instituut

From 29 June-13 October 2024, the exhibition Nature of Hope will be shown at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. One of the curators of the exhibition is Janna Bystrykh, who participated in the Rural Imaginations project conference in August 2022.

From the Nieuwe Instituut website: “This year’s biennale edition, themed Nature of Hope, is put forward by IABR Director Saskia van Stein and curated by Janna Bystrykh, Catherine Koekoek, Hani Salih, Alina Paias and Noortje Weenink. The curatorial team explores how spacial design could contribute to safeguard human existence on our planet and foster a metabolic relationship with ecological processes and local material cultures. They look at what it takes to approach the interplay of nature, culture and hope through spatial design, using hope as a driving force for social change. These efforts range from nature protective laws to stewardship activities to protect and restore wildlife, biodiversity and natural habitats. What are the building blocks of an emphatically hopeful way of architectural thinking, designing and building that can serve all life on the planet?”

Read more about the exhibition here.

“Plot, Tree and Lane” - online article by Hanneke Stuit & Neeltje ten Westenend

In collaboration with the Plot(ting) Research Group at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie - a university of applied sciences for Fine Arts and Design in Amsterdam - Hanneke Stuit co-authored, with Neeltje ten Westenend, an online article titled “Plot, Tree and Lane” about the Dutch Colonies of Benevolence and its plantation connections, using Sylvia Wynter’s “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” (1971) as a theoretical framework to reflect on the way the Colonies are being archived in the present.

Read the article here. Image taken from the article. Image credit: View of Frederiksoord Colony, print from ca. 1819–1821, in Johannes van den Bosch, De la Colonie de Frederiks-oord et de ses Moyens de Subvenir aux Besoins de l’Indigence par le Défrichement des Terres Vagues et Incultes, trans. Charles Louis Guillaume Josephe de Keverberg (Gent: Houdin, 1821). © Koloniën van Weldadigheid – Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

Keynote Esther Peeren @ Re-Reading British and Irish Landscapes in the 21st Century Conference

On 14-15 June 2024, Esther Peeren gave a keynote at the Re-Reading British and Irish Landscapes in the 21st Century conference at the University of Mannheim titled “Globalized Rural Landscapes in Daisy Hildyard’s Emergency and Vron Ware’s Return of a Native: Learning from the Land.”

In Death of a Discipline, Gayatri Spivak calls the rural the “forgotten front of globalization” as the way globalization is spectralizing the rural remains largely unnoticed from perspectives on globalization that center the urban. While Spivak situates this spectralization of the rural in the Global South, it also affects rural areas in the Global North. In this lecture, I argue that, in the UK, because of the lingering tendency to conceive of rural landscapes as properly idyllic or pastoral, it is particularly difficult to make visible the longstanding spectralizing impact globalization has had on such landscapes, which are entangled with colonial and industrial histories that have left deep scars on the land and on the human and more-than-human lives unfolding on and in it. It seems that recognizing these scars is often only possible in retrospect, from a position of having been or being at a spatial distance from the rural. Through a comparative close reading of Daisy Hildyard’s 2022 novel Emergency, in which a woman caught in a city apartment during a Covid lockdown looks back on her childhood in a rural – but in hindsight far from idyllic – village in Yorkshire, and Vron Ware’s autobiographical Return of a Native: Learning from the Land, in which the author returns to the village in Hampshire where she grew up, aiming to “read the signs” present in the landscape there of past and present crises, I explore how the spectralization of the rural by globalization may be highlighted so that the rural is no longer mistaken for a refuge from globalization.

For the conference program, see here.

Soils Exhibition @ Van Abbemuseum with Work by Wapke Feenstra

On 15 June 2024, the exhibition Soils opened at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

From the Van Abbemuseum website: “Soils are the foundation of our lives. It is where our ancestors once lived and where future generations will build an existence. It is the link between past, present and future. The source that feeds us. But the relationship between human and earth is also often strained. From land depletion and overproduction to land grabbing and (labour) exploitation. How can we re-ground ourselves in our environment? And how does that help us reconnect with each other? The group exhibition Soils addresses these questions. International artists, designers, farmers and activists work towards more empathy for our soils.” 

Artist Wapke Feenstra, with whom the Rural Imaginations team has frequently collaborated over the past years, is showing new works from her Cow and Landscape series in the exhibition.

Watch a video in which Charles Esche, director of the Van Abbemuseum, introduces the Soils exhibition here.

Artists and Farmers Exhibition @ Les Abattoirs in Toulouse

From 1 March-25 August 2024, the exhibition Artists and Farmers is on at the Les Abattoirs museum in Toulouse.

From the Les Abattoirs website: “The exhibition explores the rich and varied connections between artists and farmers, through the spectrum of the challenges facing the agricultural world today. Bringing together some 150 artworks, the exhibition aims to give context to and emphasize the intersections between art and agriculture, while examining the way in which this exchange has developed as the relationship between humans and their environment has been redefined.

Artists: Maria Thereza Alves, Jean Amblard, Mathieu Asselin, Adrián Balseca, Gianfranco Baruchello, Julien Beneyton, Michel Blazy, Rosa Bonheur, Thierry Boutonnier, Jules Breton, Mathilde Caylou, Pierre Creton, Henri Cueco, Marinette Cueco, Ágnes Dénes, Morgane Denzler, Morgan Fache, Nina Ferrer-Gleize, Aurélie Ferruel et Florentine Guédon, Sylvain Gouraud, Annabel Guérédrat, Suzanne Husky, Fabrice Hyber, Inland, Kako & Stéphane Kenkle, Léon Lhermitte, Aurelia Mihai, Jean-François Millet, Asunción Molinos Gordo, Nelly Monnier et Éric Tabuchi, Tony Morgan, Hassan Musa, Myvillages, Le Nouveau Ministère De l’Agriculture (Suzanne Husky et Stéphanie Sagot), Aurélie Olivier, Daniel Otero Torres, Jean-Baptiste Perret, Karoll Petit, Terence Pique, Émilie Pitoiset, Tabita Rezaire, Pascal Rivet, Damien Rouxel, Noémie Sauve, Daniel Spoerri, Jade Tang, Nicolas Tubéry, Agnès Varda, Simone Villemeur-Deloume, Lois Weinberger.”

More information here. Image taken from the Les Abattoirs website.

Interview with Esther Peeren in De Volkskrant (in Dutch)

On 25 May 2024, an interview with Esther Peeren about the Rural Imaginations project, in which she specifically discusses the notion of the hinterland and its relation to the rise of right-wing nationalist political parties across Europe, was published in the national Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant.

For the article (behind a paywall), see here.

Imagining Rural Futures @ Department of Geography, University of Sheffield

On 25 April 2024, the Department of Geography is presented a day dedicated to exploring the significance of rural landscapes in shaping our collective future. A workshop on Speculative Future Wetlands by Rowan Jaines (University of Sheffield) and Hester Buck (University of Bristol) was followed by lectures by Esther Peeren (University of Amsterdam) and Michael Woods (University of Aberystwyth).

See the program here.

Lecture Esther Peeren in 2023-24 School of Museum Studies (University of Leicester) Wednesday Seminar

On 24 April 2024, Esther Peeren gave a hybrid lecture titled “Rural Imaginations for a Globalized World: Beyond the Global Village as a Metaphor” at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester.

Until recently, the main focus of academic and public debates about globalization was on the urban environments containing, since 2007, a majority of the world population. The rural’s most conspicuous appearance in early globalization theory came in the form of media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s assertion that “the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.” In the first part of this lecture, I explore how the notion of the global village was much more than a mere metaphor, being derived from the British colonial strategy of villagization implemented in Kenya. The reality of the global village – as a social form prompted not by new electronic technologies but by the longstanding global reach of capitalism and colonialism – is further explored in the second part of the lecture by looking at Daisy Hildyard’s 2022 novel Emergency, in which a woman living through the Covid-pandemic in a city remembers her childhood in a Yorkshire village, and Vron Ware’s 2022 history and memoir Return of a Native: Learning from the Land, which traces land ownership and uses in the part of Hampshire where she grew up from the 18th to the 21st century.

Lecture Esther Peeren - Staying with the Village: Imagining Rural Globalization in Ruijin Li’s Return to Dust @ King’s College London

On 22 March 2024, Esther Peeren gave a lecture on imagining rural globalization at the URDST (Urbanisation, Rural Development, and Social Transformations) research group at the Lau China Institute, King’s College London. The departure point for this lecture was the way the global city is recognized as a reality, while the global village continues to be taken mostly as a metaphor. In the Chinese context of extremely rapid urbanization, the focus has often been on the lives built by rural-to-urban migrants in the cities; how this migration has impacted rural communities has received less attention. Esther looked briefly at Ruijun Li’s film Return to Dust (2022) as an example of a film centering and revaluating rural ways of life, while also critiquing the various hierarchies (gender, class, age, ableness) that pervade this life.

Reading for and from the Hinterland Panel @ American Comparative Literature Association

On 15-16 March 2024, Esther Peeren and Tjalling Valdés Olmos co-organized the panel “Reading for and from the HINTERLAND” at the American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting in Montréal.

The panel sought to push the conceptualization of the hinterland by reading for and from it. Contributors were invited to consider hinterlands, historical and contemporary, as stretching across urban, rural and wilderness, traversing land, water and air; from perspectives including but not limited to the environmental and oceanic humanities to posthumanism, affect theory, new formalism and new materialism; and in media from literature, film and television to the arts.

Find the full panel information here.

Podcast Chen Zhou @ FoodThink (in Mandarin)

In Episode 20240303 of FoodThink Podcast, Chen Zhou discussed (in Mandarin) the food production system and the way the capitalist market shapes the appearance and taste of contemporary food with an ecological farmer and a lover of cooking.

Listen to the episode here.

Spui25 Amsterdam - Presentation of Planetary Hinterlands Book (in Dutch)

On 15 February 2024, five contributors to the new book Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment and Care – Marrigje Paijmans, Esther Peeren, Hanneke Stuit, Tjalling Valdés Olmos and Maarten Zwiers – discussed (in Dutch) the concept of “hinterland,” a colonial term that is being revived in the present to gain a better understanding of those places – across the urban, suburban, rural and wilderness – that offer material and logistical support for global capitalism (resources, labor, infrastructures), while often remaining invisible, where this invisibility might also offer opportunities for devising ways of living otherwise (on a damaged planet). What forms of extraction and abandonment are found in the hinterland? And what new forms of living and thinking, inspiration and care, are emerging at this “edge” of the capitalist system?

Exhibition “Who Owns the Countryside” (“Van wie is het platteland?) @ Rijksmuseum Twente

On 15 December 2023, Esther Peeren visited the exhibition “Who Owns the Countryside” at the Rijksmuseum Twente in Enschede, together with Wapke Feenstra of MyVillages, whose installation “Cow and Landscape” (pictured) is central to the exhibition. The exhibition is on until 28 January 2024, and you can read a review (in Dutch) of the exhibition in art magazine Metropolis M here, and listen to a podcast (in Dutch) in which Wapke discusses “Cow and Landscape” with art journalist Luuk Heezen here.

Keynote Esther Peeren - Rethinking the Rural North Conference, University of Copenhagen

On 7 December 2023, Esther Peeren gave a keynote on “Rural Hinterlands” at the “Rethinking the Rural North through Environmental Literature, Film and TV” conference at the University of Copenhagen.

Find the conference program here.

PhD Defense Anke Bosma

On 13 December 2023 at 10:00, Anke Bosma defended her PhD dissertation, “I Don’t Think That’s Romantic At All!”: Imagining the Dutch Rural in an Age of Globalization.

Lecture Center for Global Studies, Bern University

On 16 November 2023, Esther Peeren gave a lecture on Planetary Hinterlands at the Global Studies Center at Bern University. This lecture introduced the volume Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment and Care (co-edited with Pamila Gupta, Sarah Nuttall and Hanneke Stuit).

Peeren discussed how hinterlands manifest, historically and presently, and emphasize the importance of looking from the hinterland and reading for the affectivities of the hinterland, both those associated with the destructive demands that Anthropogenic capitalism-colonialism places on it, and those afforded by the hinterland despite and in excess of these demands.

Chen Zhou Presentation @ Beijing Farmers’ Market

On 22 September 2023, Chen Zhou presented her PhD project at the Beijing Farmers’ Market Community Store in Beijing. Her talk, organized by Foodthink, was entitled “When We Talk about Food, What does Authenticity Mean?”

When conducting fieldwork at the Beijing Farmers’ Market, Chen Zhou noticed that both the farmers and the consumers frequently use the word "authentic" to express their perceptions of ecological food. In this presentation, Chen Zhou  discusses her interpretation of “authenticity” from a relational perspective while drawing attention to the materiality of food.

Decolonisation and the Archive: Languages and Method in the Digital Era Symposium, WiSER

On 16-17 August 2023, Esther Peeren and Tjalling Valdés Olmos participated in the Decolonisation and the Archive seminar at WiSER at Wits University in Johannesburg.

Find the program here.

Biennial Gendered Worlds Lecture by Pamila Gupta

On 9 August 2023, Prof Pamila Gupta, co-editor of Planetary Hinterlands: Extraction, Abandonment and Care gave the Biennial Gendered Worlds Lecture at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. The lecture, based on her chapter in the Planetary Hinterlands book, was titled “Landscaping South Africa’s Gendered Hinterlands” and can be watched in full here.

PhD Defense Tjalling Valdés Olmos

On 19 June 2023, Tjalling Valdés Olmos defended his PhD entitled Genres of Rurality: Unsettling Affect in Popular Imaginations of the Globalized US Rural.

XXIXth ESRS Conference

In July 2023, the XXIXth European Society for Rural Sociology (ESRS) Conference took place at L’Institut Agro Rennes/Angers in France. Esther Peeren was on the scientific committee for the conference, which has as its theme Crises and the Futures of Rural Areas. Read more about the conference here.

Showcases of Rural Modernity Panel @ ENIUGH 2023

On 30 June 2023, Esther Peeren was commentator for the “Showcases of Rural Modernity: Agricultural Exhibitions and Representations of Rural Development in Comparative and Transregional Perspective” panel, organized by Steffi Marung and Ana Moledo (Leipzig University) at the European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH) conference at Leiden University. The panel comprised the following presentations:

Amalia Ribi Forclaz (Geneva), “The Peasant Peace Conference (1935, 1937): Staging rurality and mobilizing the ‘peasantry’”

Steffi Marung (Leipzig), “Showcasing the Soviet countryside: The All-Union Agricultural Exhibition from the 1930s to the 1950s”

Sarah Kunkel (Berlin), “Nkrumah’s Farms: State-controlled agriculture and nation-building in Ghana”

“The Brand of the Farmer” article in De Groene Amsterdammer (in Dutch)

In May 2023, Esther Peeren was interviewed for an article in De Groene Amsterdammer (in Dutch) about “the brand of the farmer.” The article, authored by Casper Thomas, examines the way the collective desire for an idyllic countryside life is marketed for both commercial and political gain. Read it here.

Veenhuizen Collection @ Design Academy Eindhoven

Since 2013, the Design Academy Eindhoven has had a partnership with the Province of Drenthe, the Noordveld municipality and the Veenhuizen penitentiary institute (formerly part of the Dutch Colonies of Benevolence).

The Veenhuizen Collection is the work of two groups: the detainees on the one hand, and Design Academy Eindhoven graduates on the other. The collection consists of projects and products designed by Design Academy Eindhoven graduates, which are developed and manufactured in the prison. The past, present and future of Veenhuizen form the central focus. The rich history of the place, ranging from poverty alleviation to historical crafts, serves as a starting point. Detainees can attend workshops to master various skills. This skills acquisition not only ensures that the products can be produced, it also contributes to the workman’s self-esteem.

Hanneke Stuit was a guest lecturer for the Veenhuizen Collection in November 2023, preparing students at the Design Academy for a pop-up exhibition at the National Prison Museum in Veenhuizen from 27 January 2024-4 February 2024.

More information about the Veenhuizen Collection here.

Roundtable with Barbara Arneil on the Dutch Colonies of Benevolence @ Spui25

On 11 May 2023, Johan Olsthoorn organized a round table with Barbara Arneil at Spui25 in Amsterdam.

The round table focused on the political ideology behind this Dutch domestic colony. In her prize-winning book Domestic Colonies (Oxford UP, 2017), Arneil has argued that domestic colonies shared in common with overseas settler colonies a similar ideological commitment to three key principles: segregation; agrarian labour; and improvement of people and land, in both ethical and economic senses.  

Across Europe, domestic colonies attracted progressive thinkers sincerely concerned about the plight of the poor, committed to improving their welfare. From Johannes van den Bosch in the Netherlands and Sir John Sinclair in Scotland, to Alexis de Tocqueville in France and Jeremy Bentham in England. All of them wrote essays defending such domestic colonies over alternative social policies. Yet as the colonies evolved and its inhabitants swelled in numbers, the colonies often acquired disciplinary and sometimes outright penal dimensions. What is the place of free and unfree colonies of benevolence in the history of social welfare policy?

Speakers: Barbara Arneil, Hanneke Stuit, Craig Wittall.

For more information, see here.

Symposium The Dutch Colonies of Benevolence in International Context

On 9 May 2023, a symposium on The Dutch Colonies of Benevolence in International Context was held at the National Prison Museum in Veenhuizen.

Exactly 200 years ago, the agricultural colony at Veenhuizen was first opened. Established as a social experiment to combat poverty, re-educate people, and transform wasteland into productive agricultural land, the Colony housed thousands of poor families, vagrants, orphans, widows, and criminals for decades. Because of their great cultural-historical importance, the Dutch and Flemish Colonies of Benevolence were granted the UNESCO World Heritage status in 2021. This day-long public symposium celebrates both the 200th anniversary and the newly acquired World Heritage status. Fifteen leading national and international researchers, including Hanneke Stuit, discussed the Colonies from multidisciplinary angles.

With: Barbara Arneil (UBC) – Anne Brunon Ernst (Parijs) – Geertje Bernaerts (Karvansera) - Iain Mackinnon (Coventry) –Paul Meurs (Steenhuismeurs) – Sabrina Puddu (Leuven) – Colin Ripley (Toronto) – Angelie Sens (Amsterdam) – Freek Schmidt (VU) – Hanneke Stuit (UvA) –Vincent Tassenaar & Richard Paping (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) – Stephen Toth (Arizona) – Craig Whittall (London)

For more information and the full program, see here.

Kaas = NL? Book Review in Trouw (in Dutch)

In April 2023, the Dutch national newspaper Trouw reviewed the edited volume Kaas = NL? (Cheese = NL?), to which Anke Bosma and Esther Peeren contributed a chapter. Read the review here.

ACLA Conference - Panel on Life in Ruins: Inhabiting Empire’s Sacrifice Zones

In March 2023, Esther Peeren participated in a panel at the annual conference of the ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) on Life in Ruins: Inhabiting Empire’s Sacrifice Zones (organized by Hannah Cole and Pierre-Elliot Caswell). The paper presented was titled “Living On in Extractive Rural Hinterlands.”

Radio Appearance (in Dutch)

In March 2023, Esther Peeren was a guest on the radio program Onvoltooid Verleden Tijd (OVT), together with cultural historian Gerard Rooijakkers, to talk about the persistence and political mobilization of romanticized imaginations of farming in the Netherlands. Listen here.

Presentation Esther Peeren at Province of Flevoland

In November 2022, Esther Peeren was invited, together with Niek Persoon (director of Amsterdam Green Campus) to present the findings of her research with Peter van Dam on the way farmers position themselves in debates about sustainability at the Provincial House in Flevoland. The presentation was attended by several policymakers from the provincial authorities seeking to enter into a more productive dialogue with farmers about the transition to a more sustainable agriculture. In September 2021, Esther Peeren and Peter van Dam also presented their research to Ilse Zaal, provincial executive for the province of Noord-Holland and responsible for agricultural policy, at Amsterdam Green Campus.

Why Is Farmer Wants a Wife Still So Popular in the Netherlands?

In October 2023, Esther Peeren was interviewed for an article in the online TV guide Televisier.nl about the enduring popularity of the dating show Farmer Wants a Wife, on which she wrote an article (published in the Journal of Rural Studies) together with Irina Souch (see Publications). The article in Televisier.nl (in Dutch) can be found here.

“Being a Farmer” Article in De Groene Amsterdammer (in Dutch)

In December 2022, Casper Thomas published an article in De Groene Amsterdammer on the juxtaposition of authentic rurality to the soulless city, for which he interviewed Esther Peeren. The article can be found here.

“Tot op de bodem” Newsletter

In December 2022, Esther Peeren contributed (in Dutch) to the newsletter “Tot op de bodem” produced by the Environment & Society research group at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. The newsletter focuses on the consequences of gas extraction in rural Groningen, and Esther’s contribution focuses on the question of whether rural Groningen can be seen as a sacrifice zone. Read the contribution here.

IMAJINE Possible Future Scenarios

The EU-funded IMAJINE (Integrative Mechanisms for Addressing Spatial Justice and Territorial Inequalities in Europe) project, led by Michael Woods, aims to develop integrative policy mechanisms for tackling territorial inequalities and promoting spatial justice. As part of the project, a set of possible future scenarios has been developed, to which Esther Peeren wrote a response from the perspective of the Rural Imaginations project. Read the response here.

Onder Mediadoctoren Podcast

In November 2022, Esther Peeren participated in the Onder Mediadoctoren podcast (in Dutch). With podcast hosts Linda Duits and Vincent Crohne, she discussed how Dutch farmers are associated with authenticity. Listen here.

The Spectralized Rural and the Haunting Force of the Idyll

On 29 September 2022, Esther Peeren gave a keynote lecture at the interdisciplinary workshop “Politiken der Idylle,” held at Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, organized by Michalina Golinczak and Pablo Valdivia. The lecture was entitled “The Spectralized Rural and the Haunting Force of the Idyll.” The full program of the workshop is available here.

Rural History Conference, Uppsala, June 2022

At the fifth biennial conference of the European Rural History Organisation (EURHO) in Uppsala from 20-23 June 2022, Tjalling Valdés Olmos chaired the “Representations of the Countryside” session, which featured four presentations: 

• Michael Belding, “‘We Have Taken’: Indigenous Dispossession in the Agricultural Reform Movement”

• Agata Koprowicz, “Between Subordination and Emancipation: Peasants and Photography in Poland (1864–1937)”

• Tjalling Valdés Olmos, “Farm at the End of the World: Representations of Rural Southwestern History, Environmental Crisis, and Settler Colonialism in US Dystopian Fiction”

• Esther Peeren, “Representing Rural History as a Haunting Force in Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days and Apex Hides the Hurt” 

For the full program of the conference, see: https://www.ruralhistory2021.se/   

Hinterlands at Sea in Ben Smith's Doggerland

On 11 April 2022, Esther Peeren gave a virtual guest lecture at the European Studies Group at the University of Iowa entitled "Hinterlands at Sea in Ben Smith's Doggerland".

While the rural-urban-riverine-maritime hinterlands of contemporary global capital are as contested as the hinterlands of the heydays of colonialism, instead of as spaces to be developed, they manifest as overdeveloped to the point of being laid waste to.

In her lecture, Peeren explored the question of what it means to live in such a hinterland of abandonment by turning to Ben Smith’s 2019 novel Doggerland, set on a wind farm in the North Sea maintained by two men in a dystopian future when the world is run by the Company and all life – including the life of the Company itself – is petering out.

Boeren met toekomst | Raad voor de leefomgeving en infrastructuur (rli.nl)

In December 2021, the Council for the Environment and Infrastructure (Rli), a strategic advisory board for the Dutch government, published an advisory report to the Minister of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality entitled "Farming with a Future" (in Dutch). Esther Peeren served as an external referent for the report. Read more about the report here (in Dutch).

ENTWINED Online Assemblage - Institute for Creative Arts Practice - Newcastle University (ncl.ac.uk)

The ENTWINED Online Assemblage, released 29 November 2021, is an asynchronous online conference, hosted by Newcastle University’s Institute for Creative Arts Practice. Consisting of a collection of short presentations, this conference seeks to interrogate the interconnectedness of rural land and lives. Invited speakers include artists and academics that are concerned with rurality and/or what makes ‘place’. One of the videos is by Rural Imaginations project leader Esther Peeren. View the program videos here.

Rural Imaginations @ Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (RIAS)

On 1-2 November 2021 the Rural Imaginations team visited the Roosevelt Institute For American Studies in Middelburg, the Netherlands. During a two-day workshop we discussed links between our research, with particular reference to the intersection of colonialism, slavery and the rural, as well as methodological questions and the Hinterlands book project. Find the program here.

Invisible Lives, Silent Voices: An International Seminar

On 19 May 2022, Esther Peeren gave an online presentation on “Politics of Visibility and Invisibility in the Hinterland” in the Invisible Lives, Silent Voices seminar, convened by Alice Borrego (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3), Guillaume Le Blanc (Université de Paris) and Héloïse Lecomte (ENS de Lyon). Details on the seminar can be found here.

Abstract for the presentation: The hinterland, as ‘the district behind that lying along the coast (or along the shore of a river); the ‘back country’” (OED), emerged as a colonial doctrine at the time of the late nineteenth-century Scramble for Africa. It provided a way for colonial powers to claim land that they had not yet occupied, settled or even laid eyes on, but that was nonetheless envisioned as theirs to exploit. Today, hinterlands are increasingly widespread and densely layered “sacrifice zones” for capital (Brenner and Katsikis 2020: 28). The ever more generalized system of extractivism that characterizes global capitalism operates through “imperial networks (or platforms)” that not only continue to lay waste to existing hinterlands, but also create new hinterlands to be exploited and, upon exhaustion, left in a state of “barrenness” (Ye et al. 2020). These hinterlands harbor traditional extractive industries like mining and intensive agriculture, but also the logistical infrastructures crucial to sustaining and speeding up global trade, including data farms, distribution centers and waste processing plants. In this talk, I will ask what politics of visibility and invisibility characterize the hinterlands of colonial times and today: to what extent are the landscapes, infrastructures and (human and non-human) life forms of the hinterland visible or invisible, and to whom? What modes of visibility and invisibility are at stake in conceptualizations of the hinterland as “ghost acreage” (Brenner 2016), “black box” (Brenner and Katsikis 2020) or “sunken continent” (Neel 2018), and what politics do such modes make possible and impossible? How can the hinterland be rethought as a realm where there is something to see, and where this something to see is not limited to extraction, abandonment and barrenness?  

The Dutch Rural as Eternal Idyll (in Dutch)

An article in Dutch by Esther Peeren appeared in the 2021 special issue of the journal De Lage Landen focusing on “What To Do with the Rural?” The article can be found here.

Beyond Impasses of Rural Time

On 28 October 2021, during the international workshop Eternal Presents and Resurfacing Futures: Postcolonial / Postsocialist Dynamics of Time and Memory in Literature Art, Emily Ng and Hanneke Stuit delved into the ways in which the rural tends to be seen as stuck in time. What perceptions of time “block” the rural? And how can the rural get “unstuck,” making room for more productive (post)human and interspecies connections? For the full programme, see here.

Image courtesy of grammartop.com

Cultural Imaginations of the Rural: Beyond the Idyll (in Dutch)

As part of a lecture series organized by the Illustere School at the University of Amsterdam, on 1 March 2021 Esther Peeren spoke on cultural imaginations of the rural. Many of these rural imaginations - such as the popular Dutch reality TV show Boer zoekt vrouw (Farmer Wants a Wife) - are grounded in the idyll, causing non-idyllic aspects of the contemporary rural to remain invisible. Why do many people remain so attached to a genre that is so badly attuned to rural realities and what consequences does this have?  

Rural Imaginations x Rural Sociology Group WUR

On 29 March 2021, we presented the Rural Imaginations project to the Rural Sociology Group (RSO) of Wageningen University & Research at an online lunch meeting. The Rural Sociology Group studies the dynamics of food provisioning, agrarian change, and rural and regional development with an international comparative perspective.
For more information on the RSO, see: About the RSO Group - WUR.

“Corona Makes Us Dream of a Slow Life with #Cottagecore” Article in Trouw Newspaper (in Dutch)

On 15 August 2020, Robin Goudsmit wrote an article in the Dutch national newspaper Trouw about the online cottagecore trend in which Esther Peeren is cited. The article, which is in Dutch, can be read here.

Podcast on the cinematic depiction of European countrysides

PhD candidate Anke Bosma talked to Gil Kidron and Rutger Vos about imaginations of the European countryside. The conversation touched on a myriad of topics central to the Rural Imaginations project: the rural being presented as backwards; tight-knit rural communities conceived as idyllic and as horrifying; the role of capitalism in the rural and how this role is often (made) invisible; and the way the rural is imagined as white and heteronormative.

Therapeutic Politics of Care: New Ethnographies of Asia

On 20 November 2020, a live webinar on Therapeutic Politics of Care was held. It can be streamed here.
The webinar marked the launch of Emily Ng’s book A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao (2020, University of California Press).

Expert Meeting: Rural Imaginations X Dissent Magazine

On 7 May 2020 Tjalling Valdes Olmos organized an expert meeting with Max Fraser and Garrett Dash Nelson, the editors of a 2019 special issue of Dissent Magazine titled “Left Paths in Rural America.” You can find more information about the event here and the special issue here.

Animal farms and Artificial Intelligence

The Guardian article “Facial Recognition for Pigs: Is It Helping Chinese Farmers or Hurting the Poorest” takes up the issues touched upon in Mindi Schneider’s online lecture “Site, Source, and Sink: Rendering the Chinese Countryside in the Age of Pork“.

Agriculture and Patriarchy (in Dutch)

Where does patriarchy come from? According to biologist Carel van Schaik, with the arrival of agriculture the idea of the land as a possession takes root, creating the original conditions for a gender imbalance.

Re-Enchanting the Crisis: Reflections on Rurality, Futurity and COVID-19 in the United Kingdom

An article on the Covid pandemic & the Rural in the UK by Jilly Boyce Kay. European Journal of Cultural Studies 23.6 (2020)

Project Presentation Hanneke Stuit, “The Idyll on the Street?” (in Dutch)

Presentation by Hanneke Stuit titled “De idylle aan de straat?” held at the opening of the academic year at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam, in September 2020.

Interview with Esther Peeren for University of Amsterdam Website

An interview in English with Esther Peeren about the Rural Imaginations project appeared on the University of Amsterdam website in November 2020.

Rurality in Europe

Special feature in Europe Now on Rurality in Europe (2020).

GLOBAL-RURAL ERC Project

“The Global Countryside: Rural Change and Development in Globalization (GLOBAL-RURAL)” is a major research project funded by the European Research Council, led by Michael Woods at the University of Aberystwyth. More details here.

Interview with Esther Peeren in Folia (in Dutch)

An interview with Esther Peeren about the Rural Imaginations project appeared in the University of Amsterdam’s Folia Magazine in September 2019.

Whitechapel Gallery, London: The Rural Assembly

From 20-22 June 2019, Esther Peeren, Hanneke Stuit, Emily Ng and Lelia Tavakoli Farsooni attended the Rural Assembly workshop at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. Its aim was to challenge the assumptions made about rural life and culture, and to provide a new vision of the countryside grounded in everyday experience and a critique of the rural-urban binary.

Countryside Exhibition @ Guggenheim New York

Rem Koolhaas’ Countryside exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, opened in February 2020, but closed soon after because of the Covid-19 pandemic. This newspaper article contains information about the exhibition.

Manchester School of Art Creating the Countryside: the Rural Idyll Past and Present

The exhibition “Creating the Countryside” was held in 2017 and curated by Rosemary Shirley and Verity Elson.

Amsterdam Green Campus Workshop Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Agrarian Sector

On 27 November 2020, a workshop convening scholars and scientists from the University of Amsterdam from different disciplines, all working on the agrarian sector, was convened by Niek Persoon, director of Amsterdam Green Campus, a non-profit foundation working towards a more sustainable environment. Esther Peeren and historian Peter van Dam presented their humanities perspective on a survey of farmers in Hollands Kroon conducted by Amsterdam Green Campus for the municipality.

Research Team Publication in Collateral

An article cluster called “Dutch Domestic Colonization: From Rural Idyll to Prison Museum” was published in Collateral, an online journal for cross-cultural close reading, in 2020. The cluster comprises contributions from Hanneke Stuit, Anke Bosma & Tjalling Valdés Olmos, Emily Ng and Esther Peeren. You can find the cluster here.

Aberystwyth Expert Meeting

In November 2019, the RURALIMAGINATIONS project held its first international expert meeting at the University of Aberysthwyth, in collaboration with Michael Woods. You can find the Expert Meeting Program here.

RURALIMAGINATIONS Project Launch

On 5 June 2019, the RURALIMAGINATIONS project was launched at the University of Amsterdam.
Presentation RURALIMAGINATIONS Team
Presentation Wapke Feenstra
Presentation Menelaos Gkartzios
Presentation Rosemary Shirley

MyVillages Artist Collective

MyVillages is an artist collective founded by Kathrin Böhm (UK/DE), Wapke Feenstra (NL) and Antje Schiffers (DE) in 2003, to advocate for a new understanding of the rural as a place of and for cultural production.

The Rural, edited by Myvillages appeared in 2019. It presents “an investigation through texts, interviews, and documentation of the complex relationship between the urban, the rural, and contemporary cultural production.”

Rurality Re-imagined: Villagers, Farmers, Wanderers and Wild Things

Edited by Ben Springer, Rurality Re-imagined (2018) contains a chapter by Esther Peeren titled “Villages Gone Wild: Death by Rural Idyll in The Casual Vacancy and Glue.”

Menelaos Gkartzios: Contemporary Arts in Rural Development

Contemporary Arts in Rural Development, the research project led by Menelaos Gkartzios (Newcastle University), is a UK-Japanese international network of stakeholders with expertise in contemporary arts practice, rural community development and rural planning.