RGS-IBG Annual Conference, London, 30th August – 1st September 2006.
A Session organised on behalf of the Rural Geography Research Group
Competing Knowledges and Uncertain Agricultural Futures
Convenors: Lewis Holloway (University of Hull), Damian Maye (Coventry
University), David Watts (Coventry University)
Key changes in the agricultural policy regime in Europe, driven by global trade
policy negotiation, are causing conditions of uncertainty for farmers and
others with interests in rural land management, with important implications for
how rural land is managed and how agricultural businesses are structured.
Crucially, the introduction of the Single Farm Payment is seen as a turning
point in the relationship between individual farm businesses and the European
state, yet its effects on farming and the countryside are by no means
predictable. The supposed ‘decoupling’ of agricultural production from
agricultural support mechanisms and the increasing policy focus on wider issues
of rural development have produced a situation where many involved in
agriculture are rethinking the ways they farm, or indeed whether they should
continue in farming at all. This is happening, too, in a context where farmers
are urged to become more oriented towards specific markets and to take into
account the effects of their agricultural practices on the farmed environment.
Simultaneously, others interested in rural land use are suggesting possible
alternative trajectories of change in how the countryside is conceptualised and
managed. There is thus a range of potentially competing knowledges
(agricultural, environmental, rural development, policy, etc.) being brought to
bear on the future of the European farmed countryside. Against this context of
uncertainty and change, we seek papers that address that following inter-linked
questions:
• How are these changes forcing us to reconceptualise agriculture and its
role
in the countryside?
• What are the effects of these changes for the production of different
rural
spaces and their associated economies and communities?
• How are ‘traditional’ farming knowledges and practices being
restructured in
relation to this context of political economic change, and what other
knowledges and practices are implicated?
Please send abstracts (max. 200 words) for papers addressing these and related
questions by 31st January 2006 to: Lewis Holloway, Department of Geography,
University of Hull, Hull, HU6 7RX (Email: [log in to unmask]), Damian Maye,
Coventry University, Coventry, CV1 5FB (Email: [log in to unmask]), and
David Watts, Coventry University, Coventry, CV1 5FB (Email:
[log in to unmask])
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