ACRU2027 : Have we ever been rural ? Epistemological, methodological and empirical inquiries across ruralities – call for panels

Have we ever been rural ? Epistemological, methodological and empirical inquiries across ruralities – call for panels

Inaugural conference of the Anthropology Across Ruralities Network (ACRU)
European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA)

VINSEUM Museum of Wine Cultures of Catalonia, Vilafranca del Penedès, Spain30 June – 2 July 2027

Rurality seems to be on everyone’s lips. Farmers’ mobilisations and tractor blockades, depopulation and ‘emptying’, back-to-the-land imaginaries, powerful reorganisations of energy and food supply, the shrinking presence of schools and other state institutions. Across very different settings, rurality has been centred as a site where the crises of the present are said to be playing out. Yet many of these social and political shifts seem paradoxical. The consolidation of urban centres as sites of employment, political decision-making and economic accumulation has in places driven massive rural outmigration, and with it the attrition of social infrastructure and village life. Yet in others, utopian visions of rural life as a solution to the crises of the modern world are reinforcing existing patterns of neo-rural settlement, amplified by the explosion of remote work following the Covid-19 pandemic. Anticapitalist models of production in rural spaces clash and coexist with the electoral expansion of the far-right movements. Aggressive development schemes and mineral extraction grind gears against visions of the countryside as peaceful idyll and site for contemplation. These contrast in turn with mobilities of a wholly other order, tied to agrarian labour regimes or to war and violence that destabilize rural livelihoods and families. Rural spaces have become a focal point for myriad media discourse and government action, drawing investment and disinvestment, nostalgia and disdain, in equal measure. They are also, increasingly, a focal point for anthropologists.

The place of rurality in anthropology is an equally paradoxical one. Anthropology was born, in large part, as the study of social life beyond European cities, and yet early anthropologists rarely spoke in terms of ‘rurality’. Although anthropologists have long conducted fieldwork in what we might now define as rural spaces, the rural itself was often left analytically implicit. Rather, ethnographic attention was typically directed towards conceptual frames such as agrarian transformations, indigenous life or peasant communities, colonial struggles, centre–periphery relations, or folkloric traditions. Since the discipline’s founding ethnographies, of course, a wide range of anthropological traditions have developed across the globe, following distinct national and regional trajectories that are today explicitly examined through the lens of ‘the rural’.

Yet beyond these disciplinary trajectories, it seems clear that rural topics are today gaining renewed ground among varied theoretical frames, research objectives and fieldwork practices. What intellectual work does ‘the rural’ perform as an analytical category, and why is it highly fruitful for some, while other traditions may avoid it? What lies behind this heuristic and methodological framing, and what does mobilising the concept of the ‘rural’ today bring to the fore? Which are the intellectual reference points for new generations of anthropologists turning to rural fieldwork? How are interdisciplinary  porosities (inherited and in the making) opening across disciplinary divides to shape current debates and approaches to ruralities? To what extent does the increasing interest in ‘the rural’ flatten the heterogeneity and dynamism of rural life? Is the growing interest in agricultural, environmental and climate crises itself a driver of anthropology’s renewed turn toward the rural as a field site? And does the interest of anthropologists in rural spaces risk reproducing, in a new form, the very urban/rural divide it seeks to question? Many responses have been given to these questions, and we welcome panels that engage them further.

One of the central interrogations of the conference thus concerns the particular historical conjuncture of the rural category within anthropology today. Rather than seeking to define what rurality is, this conference asks: what does saying ‘rural’ do, what does categorizing our ethnographies as ‘rural’ produce? Rather than seeking to enclose the rural as a self-bound analytical frame, we are interested in delving into the multiple uses of rurality both as an emic and an etic category: what it makes visible and what it obscures, what kinds of objects and scales it produces, and what follows from choosing it over other framings (the agrarian, the peripheral, the folkloric), or from rejecting it altogether. 

A second question animating our reflections is this: what does anthropology, with its ethnographic attention to rural lives as producers of political claims and subjects of knowledge production, and not only as its objects, have to contribute to the understanding of ruralities? The intention is not to work towards the constitution of an autonomous sub-field of ‘rural anthropology’, but rather to bring together ethnographers working across diverse rural realities and to foster dialogue in and from these contexts. This entails the heuristic gesture of positioning ruralities at the heart of anthropological knowledge production, and examining how they are redefined through the emic categories that emerge from our interlocutors’ own terms. We believe that the analysis of ruralities – as both receivers and drivers of sometimes brutal global change – is central to understanding the social, political, economic and ecological dynamics shaping today’s world.

Our approach is intentionally broad, seeking to accommodate diverse emerging themes from contemporary rural ethnographies, which will serve as the driving force for the conference’s central discussions. That is, rather than planning thematic orientations a priori, we invite them to emerge inductively through ethnographically ground interventions. 

We therefore invite panel proposals along three broad axes:

1. What does saying ‘rural’ do? Epistemological and heuristic reflections on the rural in anthropology. Panels here might address topics such as the genealogy of the rural as an analytic category and its national and disciplinary traditions. They might also explore its relation to adjacent categories and to the conceptual divides it helps sustain. Or examine the prominence of rurality in anthropological research today and what this speaks to in terms of disciplinary debate. We are particularly interested in the tension between etic constructions and emic imaginaries as well as in and the politics attached to the concept of rurality, including its mobilisation in policy, in tourism, and in the making of the countryside as refuge, utopia or fix. We are equally interested in what the category of the rural allows us to see and what it conceals. For instance, why does the use of ‘rural’ in anthropology seem so often to speak of agricultural production? Does this tendency reveal the rural as conceptual space of ‘production’ feeding and serving urban needs? Additionally, what productive friction is revealed by anthropologists who decline the category altogether?

2. Anthropologists across ruralities: methodological questions arising from research in rural settings. Panels on the practice of ethnographic research in rural spaces might address topics such as  the construction of the field and its scales. They might explore multi-sited, comparative and collaborative designs, the ethics and politics of anthropologists’ presence in small communities. We also welcome reflection on the position of researchers themselves: universities are heavily urban institutions, and the rural is typically partitioned off as a site one goes to rather than lives in. What tensions does this produce for anthropologists who work on and in rural spaces? Is it possible to ‘live’ in rural spaces while engaged in formal academic work? How do national traditions shape this? 

3. Learning from rural experiences: ethnographic accounts of ruralities in the making. Panels here should be grounded in ethnographic accounts of how rural worlds are being made and remade in relation to myriad themes: agrarian change and food systems; environmental and climate change; extraction, energy and infrastructure; labour and its reorganisation; migration and demographic change; housing and mobility; tourism; political mobilisation and the rise of new-right wing movements; care and social reproduction; land dispossession and territorial resistance. We are especially interested in work that treats rural spaces as observatories of wider social processes: as sites of active knowledge production and as agents in global change, rather than as reservoirs of traditional particularities or passive receivers of urban thought and political projects. 

Submission guidelines

The conference will take place in person at VINSEUM Museum of Wine Cultures of Catalonia, in Vilafranca del Penedès, an hour from Barcelona. There will not be an online option for participation, barring extenuating circumstances. 

We invite panel proposals of up to 250 words, to be submitted via the conference website by  November 23rd 2026. Proposals will be evaluated by 2-3 reviewers drawn from the scientific committee. Decisions will be communicated by January 15th 2027, following which selected convenors will autonomously circulate their own call for papers. Each panel will comprise 4-5 papers (Panels including a discussant should count the discussant as occupying one of these slots).

Panels may be convened in English, Catalan, Spanish or French. A dedicated time slot during the conference will host panels in Catalan, Spanish and French running in parallel, without an English-language equivalent at that time. This reflects our ambition to give non-Anglophone scholarship a space of its own, rather than treating multilingualism as an optional alternative to an English-language programme. A working knowledge of English will nonetheless be necessary to participate fully in the conference. Contributors are free to submit proposals in any of the four languages (i.e. – French-speaking academics need not submit in French). Convenors should bear in mind, however, that competition for these slots will vary depending on the number of proposals received in each language. Convenors may submit only one proposal, and direct translations of a panel already submitted in another language will not be considered. Due to limited space at the venue and our aim of allowing for a maximum number of papers, the number of convenors per panel is limited to two.

Please note: the conference may potentially require a modest registration fee (final amount TBC, but likely 30-50 euros). We are hoping to secure funding to support scholars facing financial, visa, or travel barriers to attending a European conference, as well as to provide childcare on site. However, we cannot yet guarantee these elements.

Full accessibility information about the venue will be published on the conference website in the upcoming months. If you have specific access needs that would affect whether you can propose or attend, please contact us at acru@easaonline.org

Full calendar:

• Panel proposal deadline: 23 November 2026
• Panel decisions communicated: 15 January, 2027
• Call for papers by selected panels: 15 January 2027 
• Paper proposal deadline: 1 March 2027
• Paper decisions communicated: 15  March 2027
• Conference registration: 16 March to 16 June 2027  
• Conference: 30 June – 2 July 2027

Organising committee

• Sara Escudero Rubio – PhD Candidate, University Paris Nanterre
• Morgan Jenatton – Hallsworth Research Fellow in Anthropology, University of Manchester
• Eloi Sendrós Ferrer – Adjunct Lecturer, University of Barcelona

Scientific committee

• Gala Agüero – Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Lille
• Rebecca Cassidy – William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
• Jaume Franquesa – Professor of Anthropology, University at Buffalo
• George Iordachescu – Assistant Professor, Wageningen University
• Marguerite Maclouf – PhD candidate, School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS)
• Camila del Mármol –  Professor of Anthropology, University of Barcelona
• Michel Naepels – Research Director, French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS); Director of Studies, School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) 
• Nathalie Ortar – Research Director, French Ministry of Ecology and Sustainable Development
• China Sajadian – Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Vassar College
• Nikita Simpson – Reader in Anthropology, SOAS University of London
• Karen Sykes – Professor of Anthropology, University of Manchester
• Gabriela Torres Mazuera – Research Professor, Mexican Centre for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS)
• Ismael Vaccaro – Research Professor, Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
• Amelia Veitch– PhD candidate , University of Lausanne and School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS)