Rural Futures

‘Governance at the edge of the State’ (GOVEDSTA) Summer School

Bologna 23-27 June 2025

This Summer School addresses the question of rural futures ‘at the edge of the state’ from a planetary perspective. We propose a programme that builds on current agrarian research by considering contemporary transformations in farming, forestry, (agro-)pastoralism, and extractivism in correlation with questions of public authority, work, and labour in global capitalist supply chains. The intent is to re-imagine together (a scope for) contemporary rural geographies through analysing their global dynamics, ramifications, and effects from a planetary, inter-scalar perspective.

This 9th edition of the GOVEDSTA Summer School builds on its institutional partners, which have a longstanding expertise in the political ecology of land, mineral resources, food, and conservation governance – while paying particular attention to questions (and conflicts) around rights and access that are of concern in today’s complex dynamics of rural dispossession, commodification, and accumulation. We invite applicants to consider these specific questions:

  • Which specific transformations do we see emerging in contemporary dynamics of rural dispossession, commodification, and accumulation?
  • Which new interfaces result from these changes (e.g., between rural and urban, human, and extra-human, material, and immaterial dimensions of change)?
  • What transformations in and conflicts over property and land emerge?
  • How are the roles of and relations between capital, labour, and public authority reconfiguring in these processes?
  • What new institutions and challenges for governance arise?

 

In line with the general scope of the GOVEDSTA Summer School series, the call is directed more specifically towards those “unruly” edges of contemporary (“late” or “extractivist”) capitalism where the public authority over the rights and access to land, mineral resources, food, and nature conservation is never predetermined, but rather emerging through dynamics of conflict, struggle, and mediation. More specific questions that emerge in this regard include (but are not limited to): what are the terms of accumulation and resistance to capitalist extraction? How are the rights of access to the world’s so-called ‘natural resources’ formulated, negotiated, and contested in rural contexts today? How are the boundaries between legitimate or il|legitimate extraction, production and exchange drawn, reproduced, and maintained in today’s increasingly globalized spaces of resource commodification? Who is included; who is excluded? What kinds of politics are involved? What kinds of spatial connections and disconnections do we see emerging?

 

Practicalities

The course will be open to 30 participants. We invite applications by PhD and early post-doctoral students from the social sciences and humanities whose research project is in line with the thematic scope of the course. Priority will be given to students who have concluded substantial fieldwork in line with the specific call. Candidates should apply by sending a series of documents as proven track record of their study:

  1. For students possessing a degree obtained in an Italian University: the self-certified declaration of the academic qualification giving the final degree score, details of the exams passed and relative grades or, if not yet graduated, the presumed date of graduation along with details of exams passed and their marks;
  2. for students possessing a degree obtained abroad: (a) the Declaration of Value (or Diploma Supplement for academic qualifications awarded by institutions in countries in the European Higher Education Area-Bologna Process); (b) the Official Academic Qualification; (c) the officially translated and legalized Academic Transcripts (if the language is different from English, French or Spanish); (c.1.) proof that the request for the Declaration of Value has been submitted to the Italian Consulate in the country where you obtained the degree qualification (c.2.) alternatively: the Diploma Supplement from the relevant University; in this case, you will be conditionally admitted to the selection procedure and will have to produce the relative documentation upon enrolment)
  3. a one-page CV
  4. a 1000-word outline of a research paper to be discussed at the course. This outline should specify how their PhD project relates to the overall theme of this course and give clear indications on the theoretical and methodological approach adopted.

Selected candidates will be asked to submit a full paper to be discussed during the Summer School.

Timing

Applications should be made through no later than 15 February 2025 via the online application mode www.studenti.unibo.it – simply following the instructions for registration through the registration button: a window will appear where to select the type of course (select Summer School and then the Rural Futures Summer School) and by paying the administrative fee of 10 euros.

Successful applicants will be notified by 10 March 2024. The participant’s fee will be 150 EUROS (excluding lunches and coffee). Participants will have to cover their own transport and accommodation expenses. The working language of the Summer School is English.

ECTS points for participation: 5