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- Biegańska, Jadwiga, et al.
(author)
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Rural development vs. conceptually induced harm
- 2018
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In: 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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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)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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| 2. |
- Biegańska, Jadwiga, et al.
(author)
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Wicked problems or wicked solutions? Sustainability–differently
- 2018
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In: Urban Research, Mistra Urban Futures, 18 September 2018, Gothenburg, Sweden..
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Obtaining functional and inclusive societal organization is not a simple matter of ‘doing it’ by subscribing to winning formulae as there are many choices to be made in the process. Given that conceptual frameworks always guide thoughts, judgments and actions, how we relate to ‘sustainability’ specifically becomes relevant if we aim to achieve a more liveable society. It is increasingly appreciated how all societies contain ‘wicked problems’ or socio-cultural challenges that are multidimensional, hard to pin down and consequently extremely challenging to solve. This seminar engages with the consequent need to recognise this complexity by assembling three ‘brave’ takes on far-advanced problems bedevilling conventionally conceptualised paths towards sustainability. Arguing against oversimplification that comes from domination of polarizing concepts and unquestioned practices and rhetorics, the aim of this seminar is to foster explorations into new territories from which we may learn. This involves thinking differently, even if such thinking must sometimes both provoke and cauterise dissent, and revisit divergent ideological standpoints in order not to dismiss out-of-hand ways towards supposedly common goals.
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| 3. |
- Chodkowska-Miszczuk, Justyna, et al.
(author)
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Biogas enterprises : A chance or a challenge for rural development?
- 2018
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In: Challenged Ruralities. - Copenhagen : University of Copenhagen – Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management.
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper addresses the question whether biogas plants (businesses based on renewable energy) often marketed as a great opportunity for rural development can at the same time pose a hidden challenge. Departing from the concept of embeddedness of enterprises in the local environment, our objective is realized with the help of two models of biogas plants. In the first model, biogas plants operate as an integral part of agricultural farms (biogas on-farm model); in the second model, they operate as independent companies established through investments by external entrepreneurs (biogas off-farm model). The two models have proven to affect the economies of particular biogas enterprises very differently. In the first model, the support of existing agricultural farms is of great importance as those usually are important for local stakeholders. In the second model, biogas plants that emerge as new external investments must build interactions with local entities from scratch. From an economic point of view, the lack of functioning mechanisms in this sense may influence further directions of development for many rural areas traditionally associated with agriculture.
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| 4. |
- Dymitrow, Mirek, et al.
(author)
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Deprivation and the rural-urban trap
- 2018
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In: Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie. - : Wiley. - 0040-747X .- 1467-9663. ; 109:1, s. 87-108
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Departing from the idea that cultural mechanisms are capable of allowing for conceptual dichotomies to create oppression, this article challenges the engrained tradition of using ‘urban/rural’ as guiding labels in societal organization when seen through the prism of deprivation. Two Polish 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 results indicate that the notions of rurality and urbanity imbricate and leapfrog meaningful territories at the local level. Realizing the danger of deploying stereotypes as beacons in governance, from this richly contextualized account we draw that many problems today are space-independent and cannot be attenuated by following development paths reinvented in the name of some empirically questionable yet culturally sustained and politically ontologized spatialities. This, then, calls for rethinking both the discursivity and the elusiveness of rural-urban thinking in the context of deprivation.
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