Conferences
11–12 August 2017, Telciu-Bistrița, Romania
The 6th Annual Telciu Summer Conference "Postsocialist/Postcolonial Rural Lifeworlds vs Degrowth, Defuturing, Decoloniality
The 6th Annual Telciu Summer Conference seeks contributions on the history, impact and perspectives of “alternatives to development” (Arturo Escobar), rather than alternative developments and of approaches to sustainability considered in relation to rural lifeworlds, subsistence economies, and rural-urban networks. We are interested in contributions conceiving rurality as an extended field and exploring the historical, social and economic positionalities of peripheries in the context of delinking (Walter Mignolo) from liberal and neoliberal development projects and global designs that lead to “defuturing” as “a condition of mind and action that materially erodes (un-measurably) planetary finite time, thus gathering and designating the negation of ‘the being of time’, which is equally the taking away of our future” (Tony Fry). What differing histories and ideas respond to the urgent necessity of building an ecological and non-consumerist world, against models of civilization based on the extraction of life and resources? How are the projects of modernization and the continuous encroachments on the commons, natural resources and subsistence economies articulated and answered in different regions? What characterizes the modern histories of social composition of the ruralities of Europe? What are the range and limits of rural subsistence economies and their social networks? How do the “East”, the “South” and the multiple “others” of Europe, including its internal, imperial and colonial others, see or redefine their well-being? What are the realities and possibilities of change, particularly at the local and regional level? What models, counter-histories and alliances are relevant in this juncture?
We encourage submissions that engage with these topics both theoretically and in terms of specific historical experiences, across disciplines and on any scale, from the local to the global. Seeking balance between specific case studies and comparative/transnational approaches, we invite contributions engaging with, but not limited to, the following thematic foci:
Reconceptualizing Peasantries, Reassessing Modernities
Rural Sustainable Economies and Subsistence Economies
Degrowth and Sustainability
Land Grabbing and Resistance
Alternative Regionalisms and Ruralities of Europe
Social Histories of Rurality
Rurality and Transnational Flows
Rurality and Technology
Interactions between Rurality and Urbanity
Capitalism, Socialism, and Cooperativism in the Rural World
Modernities, Temporalities, and Ruralities
Decolonial Options to the Rural-Urban Divide
Vernacular Religion and Peasant Culture
Agriculture and Socio-Economic Modernization
Folk-Populisms, Nationalisms, and Imperialisms
Projects of Internal Colonialism and Peasant Resistance
Thinking from the Rural Periphery
Reagrarianization and the “End of History”