| 1. |
- Almén Linn, Jenny, 1971, et al.
(författare)
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Food tourism as a way of integration into the Swedish labor market?
- 2018
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Ingår i: Tomorrow’s Food Travel (TFT) conference, Centre for Tourism – University of Gothenburg, 8–10 October 2018, Gothenburg, Sweden.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The tourism industry is a sector with a large income and is expected to continue its expansion both in Sweden as well as internationally. The last couple of years have seen the total consumption within the tourism industry amount to 270 billion SEK. Due to Sweden’s rich natural and cultural values, attractive and clean nature and well-functioning cities, growth is expected. However, not all parts of the country partake in the expansion at the same rate. In Gothenburg, its north-eastern districts receive almost every second newly-immigrated resident, while the pressing housing shortage locks in a familiar pattern of poor living conditions, ill health and dire future outlooks. Gothenburg continues to be a socio-economically segregated city, while its northern districts are in strong need of enhanced development to increase their level of self-sufficiency and of breaking negative patterns. At the same time, there are great assets vested in the area in the form of agricultural landscapes, attractive natural settings and a strong cultural life with influences from all over the world. To this background, this presentation looks into whether socio-economic problems inherent of a segregated city can be partly solved by engaging in the growing tourism sector and by focusing on food production, sustainable tourism, and the natural and cultural advantages of the area. This is done by investigating an ongoing municipal sustainability project in the north-eastern areas of Gothenburg. It is an interdisciplinary endeavor involving several different municipal authorities, research institutions and non-governmental organizations, with the intent to increase the areas sense of involvement and to strengthen sustainable business development within: food production, tourism, green business and climate-smart logistics platforms and networks for cooperation. The aim of this presentation is to explore how social inclusion and labor market integration can be facilitated through tourism and food.
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| 2. |
- Almered Olsson, Gunilla, 1951, et al.
(författare)
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City–Region Food Systems: Scenarios to re-establish urban-rural links through sustainable food provisioning
- 2018
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Ingår i: Tomorrow’s Food Travel (TFT) conference, Centre for Tourism – University of Gothenburg, 8–10 October 2018, Gothenburg, Sweden.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- City–Region Food Systems (CRFS) is a cutting-edge concept and an emerging field of research. As a new analytical lens, it offers an integrated and multi-dimensional perspective on food’s origins, how it is grown and the path it follows to our plates and beyond. Building on this concept, this presentation reflects a prospective research project which seeks to explore opportunities for innovative and sustainable food systems in the Gothenburg region of Sweden by focusing on how rural and urban regions, food production and market can be integrated to promote regional food security. The project intends to: 1) develop scenarios with stakeholders for local food production in the region; 2) analyze the consequences of the scenarios on landscape change and biodiversity; 3) explore socio-economic consequences for producers and local communities; and 4) evaluate the sustainability and feasibility of scenarios with stakeholders. Five municipalities in Western Sweden (Gothenburg, Kungälv, Lerum, Alingsås and Essunga) will serve as study areas for the project, selected to reflect different kinds of potential for local food production in terms of dissimilar environmental conditions, prerequisites for farming and economic histories. The project responds to expressed interests and knowledge needs in the region and will be developed and implemented in direct cooperation with local and regional actors such as Västarvet, the Västra Götaland Region, the municipalities and various producer organizations. In sum, there are premises suggesting that recent urban food strategies and plans with sustainability ambitions are embracing several Sustainable Development Goals in the environmental, social, economic, and equity dimensions. This, in turn, is a characteristic of the Transition Movements pathway, in which the utility of food strategies in the work with sustainability transitions seems inevitable. The results are therefore likely to be transferable to other regions.
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| 3. |
- Almered Olsson, Gunilla, 1951, et al.
(författare)
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Food systems sustainability: For whom and by whom? – An examination of different 'food system change' viewpoints
- 2018
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Ingår i: Development Research Conference 2018: “Rethinking development”, 22–23 August 2018, Gothenburg, Sweden.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The United Nations identifies the food crisis as one of the primary overarching challenges facing the international community. Different stakeholders in the food system have widely different perspectives and interests, and challenging structural issues, such as the power differentials among them, remain largely unexamined. These challenges make rational discourse among food system actors from different disciplines, sectors and levels difficult. These challenges can often prevent them from working together effectively to find innovative ways to respond to food security challenges. This means that finding solutions to intractable and stuck issues, such as the food crisis often stall, not at implementation, but at the point of problem identification. Food system sustainability means very different things to different food system actors. These differences in no way undermine or discount the work carried out by these players. However, making these differences explicit is an essential activity that would serve to deepen theoretical and normative project outcomes. Would the impact and reach of different food projects differ if these differences were made explicit? The purpose of this initial part of a wider food system research project is not to search for difference or divergence, with the aim of critique, but rather to argue that by making these differences explicit, the overall food system project engagement will be made more robust, more inclusive and more encompassing. This paper starts with some discussion on the different food system perspectives, across scales, regions and sectors but focuses primarily on the design of processes used to understand these divergent and at times contradictory views of what a sustainable food system may be. This paper draws on ongoing work within the Mistra Urban Futures project, using the food system projects in cities as diverse as Cape Town, Manchester, Gothenburg and Kisumu as sites for this enquiry.
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| 4. |
- Arsovski, Slobodan, 1967, et al.
(författare)
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Universities, the categorical imperative and responsible research
- 2021
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Ingår i: 19th Annual STS Conference: “Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies”, Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science of the Technical University of Graz, the Inter-University Research Centre for Technology, Work and Culture (IFZ) and the Institute for Advanced Studies of Science, Technology and Society (IAS-STS), 3–5 May 2021, Graz, Austria.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Universities, as Western cultural institutions, can look back on a long development spanning several centuries. In terms of cultural significance, this puts them into the same league as the church, the state or major banks, to mention but a few. In our modern world of increased globalization and digitalization, universities are tasked with educating an ever-growing number of students. Inadvertently, this also leads to an inflation of the value of academic degrees, let alone to mention the actual quality of the skills that are being taught to students. Governments and other stakeholders are increasingly becoming interested in responsible research and innovation practices. This presentation looks into the consequences of the so called “impact agenda” and what it signifies for the trustworthiness of scientific knowledge. We understand the impact agenda to be the push to evaluate the quality of research based on its outcome (end), compared to its rigor (mean). Departing primarily from research conducted at European universities, we contend that reducing the role of the university to that of mere impact facilitation, accreditation and skills acquisition for its students, may prove detrimental to the respect for the university as an institution. Not only are universities running the risk of underappreciating what they do, but they are also fueling a greater division of society in which the citizenry is trained to use highly sophisticated conceptual tools without being provided the complex understanding needed to wield it competently egged on by research chasing an ever elusive ‘impact’. We argue that the society-wide increase of polarization – fueled by such a dynamic – will increase unless the universities actively acknowledge and embrace their role as shapers and stewards of Western culture. Within our analysis, we discuss the emergent ‘impact or starve’ paradigm to explain why such transgression of the categorical imperative are normalized and not widely publicized and problematized. We reflect both on the individual and collective consequences for knowledge production. Specifically, we draw attention to the unintended consequences that arise when the external value hierarchy of society rewards such an end focused assessment structure in terms of student numbers, research funds, and prestige, which supposedly justifies such ends. Inadvertently, such development ossifies contemporary values in the long term, and devalues the contribution of universities to the development of ideas.
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| 5. |
- Biegańska, Jadwiga, et al.
(författare)
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Inconvenient ruralities? The State Agricultural Farm vs. the rural
- 2017
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Ingår i: 11th International Conference Man–City–Nature: “New opportunities – new challenges – new perspectives”, 9–10 October 2017, Toruń, Poland.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- 1989 was a turning point within the socio-economic development in the former Eastern bloc, initiating a system transformation that affected the society at large. It also contributed to the crystallization of certain cultural settings, hitherto largely illegible due to the inhibition of spatial processes encountered during Communism. In Poland, after a quarter-century of free market economy, the focus on social problems began to expand to the spatial realm as well. It became apparent that the progressive social polarization that followed was most prominent in environments striated by a particular landscape type – the former State Agricultural Farm (PGR). Departing from the idea that cultural mechanisms are capable of allowing for established conceptual frameworks to create oppression, this paper challenges the engrained tradition of using ‘rural’ as a guiding label in societal organization when seen through the prism of deprivation. Considering their otherness, PGRs, hence, require a different way of looking at the idea of “rural development”. In this presentation, we investigate the concept of rurality in the discursive tenor of policy formulation and contrast it with a richly contextualized empirical account from a PGR in central Poland. Having taken account of the residents’ everyday lives in the socio-economic, material and discursive dimensions, our findings indicate that the notion of rurality imbricates and leapfrogs meaningful territories at the local level. Our findings suggest that many PGR-related problems are ‘space-independent’ to the point of being aggravated rather than helped by current policy goals, with commonplace conceptualizations of rurality usually ending up in failure – as in the case of “inconvenient” ruralities like post-PGR estates.
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| 6. |
- Biegańska, Jadwiga, et al.
(författare)
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Młodzież z osiedli popegeerowskich a kształtowanie społecznych zasobów lokalnych : Youths in post-PGR estates and the creation of local human resources
- 2016
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Ingår i: 32nd Seminar on Rural Geography "The role of local rural resources", organized by the Polish Geographical Association (Commission for Rural Areas) and the Polish Academy of Sciences (Stanisław Leszczycki Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization), 6-7 June 2016, Jachranka/Warsaw, Poland.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper aims to reflect upon the future direction of development in post-PGR (State Agricultural Farms) estates in Poland. Using the estate Chotel (gmina Izbica Kujawska, Kujawsko-Pomorskie voivodship) as a case study, we analyze the current human resources as represented by the local youth. Our point of departure is the assumption that youths, as a social category, will in the nearest future influence the structure of human resources, which in turn will determine both the pace and the direction of change in rural areas. Given that post-PGR estates are considered some of the most problematic settlement forms with respect to rural planning, and given that their adult residents are known to exhibit loose social bonds, intensified enmity and lack of initiative for co-operation, a number of important questions arises. Firstly, what are the specific human resources of youths in post-PGR estates? Secondly, how do these resources differ from those of their parents? Thirdly, do these resources give hope for future melioration of socio-economic problems inherent of post-PGR estates? The conducted analysis is prognosticating – a quality, which otherwise is extremely difficult to obtain in the context of the studied estates.
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| 7. |
- Biegańska, Jadwiga, et al.
(författare)
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Post-socialist estates and the concept of rurality: From policy to misery
- 2015
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Ingår i: Eastern European Countryside Revisited - 25 years after the transition, 26-27 June 2015 - Toruń, Poland.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- 1989 was a turning point within the socio-economic development in the former Eastern bloc, initiating a system transformation that affected the society at large. It also contributed to the crystallization of certain cultural landscapes, hitherto largely illegible due to the inhibition of spatial processes encountered during Communism. In Poland, after a quarter-century of free market economy, the focus on social problems began to expand to the spatial realm as well. It became apparent that the progressive social polarization that followed was most prominent in environments striated by a particular landscape type – the former State Agricultural Farm (PGR). Its dysfunctional character, noticeable in a wide array of dimensions (unemployment, poverty, social anomies, poor health, claiming attitudes, substandard housing, ghettoization) has since posed serious challenges for planners and policy-makers. Typically, estates stricken by these kinds of aggregated predicaments are associated with “urban areas” along with specific theoretical frameworks and their implications for consecutive development strategies. In that light, considering PGRs “the epitome of rurality” subject to ideas informing the direction of contemporary “rural development” prompts a different way of looking at the problem. In this paper, we investigate the concept of rurality in the discursive tenor of various development programs and contrast it with richly contextualized empirical examples. Our findings suggest that not only is the concept of rurality becoming increasingly difficult to work with on an applicative level, but – in certain environments – it may also be conducive to the reproduction of human suffering.
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| 8. |
- Biegańska, Jadwiga, et al.
(författare)
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Rural development vs. conceptually induced harm
- 2018
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Ingår i: 5th Nordic Conference for Rural Research: “Challenged ruralities: Nordic welfare states under pressure”, 14–16 May, 2018, Vingsted, Denmark. - : University of Copenhagen – Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management. - 9788779037922
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Rural regions of Europe face multiple challenges. Among the weaker ones, below-average economic productivity and insufficient supply of physical and social infrastructure have opened up for new questions and efforts to protect people from harm. One notable oversight, however, is that the concept ‘rural’ can be vastly misleading, especially in the context of development. Harm is both a moral and a legal concept, which in the broadest sense denotes any form of setback to interest that is conceptually induced. What this means is that any abstract division or delimitation upheld or enforced by social factors will at the same time enable and constrain individual agency. Conceptualizations of ‘rural’ draw on imaginations on how the world is like, while the underlying frameworks of understanding depart from efforts to best manage those imaginations. Now in instances where subjectivity is high and elusiveness takes precedence over structured coherence, most imaginations catering to valid conceptualizations of ‘rurality’ will lose their socio-material reciprocity, whereupon conceptually induced harm is likely to manifest. Departing from these ideas, out paper challenges the engrained tradition of using ‘rural’ as a guiding label in societal organisation when seen through the prism of marginalization. Two similar deprivation-ridden estates – one ‘urban’ and one ‘rural’ – were investigated. Having taken account of the residents’ everyday lives in the socio-economic, material and discursive dimensions, our findings indicate that the notions of rurality and urbanity imbricate and leapfrog meaningful territories at the local level. Our findings suggest that in order to be efficient policy must take into account the role of the concept of rurality in creating marginalization, because a problem is not “rural” unless we make it “rural”. This means that such mode of cultural labelling may miss that many ubiquitous problems transcend spatial demarcations, whereupon conventional conceptualizations of rurality usually end up in failure and disappointment. This, we argue, is especially important in the context of the changed Nordic welfare model, where increased proclivity toward political correctness, openness to immigration and submission to loss of cultural specificity have also inconspicuously altered the notion of development hitherto widely understood as rural.
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| 9. |
- Biegańska, Jadwiga, et al.
(författare)
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Ruralities of oblivion: When structural weakness gets swept under the carpet
- 2017
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Ingår i: International Conference on Challenges and Opportunities of Structurally Weak Rural Regions in Europe: ”Social Innovations and Social Enterprises Acting Under Adverse Conditions”, Adam Mickiewicz University / RurAction, 4–6 December 2017, Poznań, Poland.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Structurally weak rural regions in Europe face multiple challenges. Their below-average economic productivity and insufficient supply of physical and social infrastructure have opened up for questions on how to curb these downward spirals and keep people away from the precipice. One notable oversight is that the term “rural areas” can be vastly misleading, especially in the context of development. In Poland, in the wake of the fall of Communism, it became apparent that bad economic situation, infrastructural deficits and social polarization were most prominent in the former State Agricultural Farm (PGR). Almost three decades later, the waning academic interest in these farms left little conceptual guidance for the politicians to grab onto, and consequently most estates remain in an ever aggravating limbo. Considering PGRs the epitome of rurality in view of the ideas informing the direction of contemporary “rural development” prompts a different way of looking at the problem. In this presentation, we investigate the concept of rurality in the discursive tenor of policy formulation and contrast it with richly contextualized empirical examples from central Poland. Our findings suggest that in order to be efficient policy must take into account the role of the concept of rurality in creating structural weakness, because a problem is not “rural” unless we make it “rural”. This means that such mode of cultural labeling may miss that many ubiquitous problems transcend spatial demarcations, whereupon standard conceptualizations of rurality usually end up in failure and disappointment. This, we argue, is especially the case with “inconvenient” ruralities like post-PGR estates, which effectively get swept under the carpet.
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| 10. |
- Biegańska, Jadwiga, et al.
(författare)
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Should I stay or should I go? Polish suburbs vs. social expectations
- 2021
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Ingår i: IGU Commission on Geography of Governance 2021 Annual Conference: “New challenges of local governance in times of uncertainty and complexity”, The International Geographical Union (IGU) / Adam Mickiewicz University, 23–25 June 2021, Poznań, Poland.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Suburbanisation is one of the most important processes currently influencing the formation of settlement networks in Central and Eastern Europe, including Poland. This phenomenon began relatively late in the area, i.e., after the systemic transformation that started in the 1990s. The different pattern of settlement network transformations in Central and Eastern European countries is related not only to the moment when the process of suburbanisation began. These countries, which in the post-war period followed the model of the so-called socialist urbanisation, are distinguished by a different socio-cultural, settlement, and economic context, and above all by the very dynamic processes of suburbanisation. The aim of the study was to assess the impact of factors related to the nature of the settlement network on the perception of the suburban zone by its residents on the example of the Bydgoszcz–Toruń Metropolitan Area (Poland). It was concluded that the specificity of the suburban network is determined by: the degree of actual urbanisation of the area, distance from a large city, and the central functions performed by a given settlement unit. It was assumed that these elements influence perceptions of the suburban zone, which is critical to the sustainability of decisions regarding the choice of the suburban zone as a place to live. Thus, the extent to which individual suburban zones will have stable population in future years can be determined on this basis. The sources of information used in this study comprised statistical data obtained from Statistics Poland which, after carrying out an appropriate statistical procedure, were used to determine the specific character of the suburban areas. On the other hand, a survey conducted by the authors was used – its results helped infer how suburban residents perceive their place of residence. It was shown that suburban zones are highly differentiated settlement units in terms of their settlement specificity and social perception, which makes it possible to infer further, quite differentiated, directions of their population development and the degree of stability of the zones as spatial structures.
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