RHN 174/2024 | Call, EURHO
Organisers: Friedrich Cain (University of Vienna) and Dietlind Hüchtker (University of Vienna)
Session at Rural History 2025, 9–12 September 2025, Coimbra, Portugal
Deadline for Submissions: 10 January 2025
Call for Papers:
Politics, practices and epistemes – The rural in scientific ways of making society
Session S65 at Rural History 2025
The reporting on the latest farmers' protests in various places in Europe is indicative. Farmers are said to be overwhelmed, insufficiently informed, in short, passive objects of intellectual (i.e. urban) politics. Implicitly, different knowledge bubbles are also constructed – the climate knowledge of an urban elite collides with the economic and business knowledge of rural farms.
The panel aims to take the political constellation of knowledge cultures more seriously. Instead of assuming given collectives with divergent knowledge cultures, the panel will deconstruct the specific connections between political epistemes and knowledge-generating practices and analyse their polarizing consequences. Inspired by Anna Tsing’s following the mushroom and Michel Callon’s sociology of translation, but also by an approach that represents the reciprocity of knowledge cultures, the question is asked as to how the rural appears in scientific research and how the “research object” unfolds its power of influence. How did grain influence research? What say did rural youth have?
On this basis, the panel will discuss the political implications of these encounters. In which social constellations are which knowledge cultures emphasized, which power relations are mobilized? The panel is dedicated to Eastern and Central Europe in a transregional understanding and sees this as an opportunity to rethink the claim to universality of the history of science and at the same time to question the conception of the rural as specific.
We would be pleased if you sent a short abstract in advance to Dietlind Hüchtker (dietlind.huechtker@univie.ac.at) (to 10th of January 2025) so that we have an overview of the proposed presentations.