Esther Peeren is Professor of Cultural Analysis and Academic Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). With Jeroen de Kloet, she is series editor of Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society. From 2018 to 2023, she leads the ERC-funded RURALIMAGINATIONS project. In a synthesizing monograph, Esther will bring together the findings of the members of the team in order to map similarities and differences between popular rural imaginations in the five contexts; explore how popular cultural imaginations of the rural interact globally through processes of translation, adaptation and co-production; and assess whether the popular imagination of the rural is itself becoming (more) globalized and the implications this has for the political mobilization of the rural on a global scale (e.g. by NGO’s and international organizations). Esther’s previous research – as presented in the monographs Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakthin and Beyond (Stanford, 2008) and The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (Palgrave, 2014) – has concentrated on questions of identity formation, marginalization and agency, which will also be central to the RURALIMAGINATIONS project.

Anke Bosma is a PhD candidate in the RURALIMAGINATIONS project at ASCA, with her sub-project being ‘Imagining the Rural in post-2000 Netherlands’. Her project will assess how the rural is imagined in Dutch cultural consciousness in relation to globalization, by looking at cultural objects from tv, film, and literature through the lenses of spectrality, affect and the chronotope. Anke’s area of interest is (de)colonial theory and history, which she partly developed while doing research at the Research Centre for Material Culture. Her focus is on how coloniality takes shape and is expressed within a Dutch context. It is this interest in Dutch culture and the narratives that are under- and misrepresented in the Netherlands that has led to her joining the RURALIMAGINATIONS research group. Anke Bosma graduated from the research masters Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, and she studied at the University of Sussex and Leiden University.

Emily Ng is a postdoctoral fellow on the RURALIMAGINATIONS project at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. As part of this collaboration, she is considering how temporal, spatial, and affective genres of the rural are configured and reconfigured in contemporary Chinese cinema, television, and literature. These include engagements with the real, the spectral, and the absurd across national and transnational circuits, as well as various faces of the money form in the aftermath and conjuring of contemporary sociality. This is in juxtaposition with semicolonial legacies and the rise of China as a global figure of power and value, alongside constitutive devaluations of rural spaces, labor, and corporeality. Her past projects involved ethnographic inquiries in China on spirit mediumship and psychiatry, as well as other urban and rural religiosities. She received her PhD in Medical Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Lelia Tavakoli Farsooni is a PhD Candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) located at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Her research interests are situated at the intersection of International Relations theory and Cultural Analysis and particularly the politics of security and community. Drawing on feminist and queer theory as well as postcolonial approaches, her doctoral research explores representations of the British rural in contemporary popular culture. She examines the spatio-temporal and affective underpinnings of rural life and geographical imaginations in the UK by exploring how rurality is constituted and becomes unraveled through bucolic archetypes. Prior to joining the RURALIMAGINATIONS project, she completed her MA in International Politics at the University of Manchester. Her MA thesis explored stand-up comedy as an affective and everyday site of world politics where the embodied subject positions of migrants can be subverted and negotiated.

Tjalling Valdés Olmos is a PhD Candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam (UvA). Their research within the ERC-funded project RURALIMAGINATIONS examines the relation between processes and understandings of globalization and persisting legacies of colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist world-making that affect the manner in which the US rural is imagined and politically mobilized. His work specifically engages subversive imaginations of the US rural, and the project pays particular attention to imaginations of the queer rural, the black rural, and the indigenous rural. Tjalling holds a Master’s degree in ‘History of International Relations’ from the London School of Economics (LSE) and a two-year Research Master’s degree in ‘Gender & Ethnicity Studies’ from Utrecht University (UU). He also teaches courses in gender, sexuality, race, and cultural studies at the University of Amsterdam. Tjalling’s most recent publication, “The Coloniality of Benevolence,” can be found in Collateral Journal (2020) as part of a special issue on the rural colonies of Veenhuizen.

Calvin Duggan was Research Assistant with the RURALIMAGINATIONS project from 2020 to 2021. His research focuses on the Hay Festival, a literary festival originating in the rural town of Hay-on-Wye on the Wales-England border, and its transposition from this location to locales in the ‘Global South’: namely, Colombia and Abu Dhabi. This research seeks to intervene in contemporary debates surrounding locality, rurality, (de)colonialisation and the so-called ‘festivalisation of culture.’ With Esther Peeren, Calvin published an article, “Making up the British countryside: A posthuman critique of Country Life's narratives of rural resilience and conservation,” in the Journal of Rural Studies.

Chen Zhou is a PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam (UvA). Her project examines the ecological imaginations of contemporary rural China by tracing the biographies of ecological food that is produced in the rural and sold in the urban, from farming, consuming, eating to back-to-soil composting practices. Her research interests particularly concern the inter/intra-weaving relations between humans and nonhumans, rural and urban spaces, the real and the imaginary. By acknowledging the animate force of nonhumans and their materiality, she tries to unfold further-blurred boundaries with permeable happenings in the encounter of different domains, and explores ways to contribute to an ecological future through visualizing the co-constitution relations. Chen Zhou completed her MA in anthropology at University College London (UCL) and along with the PhD research project, she is working for eco-friendly brands as brand manager.