Call for papers - Towards new alliances: ecological struggles and territorial projects in contemporary rural areas

Meeting themes

The next meetings of the Perspectives Rurales scientific and educational network – which brings together teacher-researchers from higher education establishments in architecture, agronomy, landscape and urban planning in France and Europe, as well as the Parcs Naturels Régionaux federation – aim to examine the ways in which the practices of space/planning professionals are being redefined in the light of the resistances and struggles that are traversing and recomposing contemporary ruralities, through the following five axes:

1. Projecting alternatives: projects and counter-projects. Preventing or forking out? Doing things despite everything, but doing them differently? The practices, knowledge and methods of design, investigation, representation and training of space professionals are mobilized and reinterrogated in contexts of struggle, local mobilization or resistance. What role do these approaches play, or have played in the past, in collective mobilizations? In what ways do alternative or counter-projects also help to reconcile and recompose different conflicting interests, and contribute to the creation of collective narratives? Or to assert or even radicalize positions?
2. Experimenting in the field: taking action, building and transforming through mobilization. Fighting as a laboratory? Many mobilizations are based on more or less permanent occupations. What spatial forms do these occupations take? How do they make broader demands visible? What visions of alternative futures emerge from these occupations, and in what ways? How does resistance fit into a time frame? What thoughts about spatial projects emerge from or run through these occupations?
3. Subsisting on the margins: alternative ways of living in a place. Discreet resistance? Numerous forms of resistance can only emerge and be sustained if they remain marginal, without attacking head-on the very logics they contradict. How do these experiences challenge the dominant ecological discourse? Today, as in the past, are rural areas more receptive to these alternatives than metropolises? Can they go beyond the aspirations of a small group of individuals and form the basis of a territorial project?
4. Connecting: to places, to others in the struggle. What local and global alliances? Struggles are often based on the consolidation of a collective committed to constructed and negotiated positions. How does highlighting territorial and spatial issues help to broaden mobilizations and bring together residents and players from different backgrounds? How do they relate, today as in the past, to other local or global struggles (feminist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, decolonial movements, etc.)?
5. Learning and teaching from struggles: what transfers of knowledge and learning between militant and academic spheres? Struggles, whether discrete or visible, mobilize and produce knowledge, which is shared and exchanged from militant spheres. How is this knowledge transferred to space professionals? What prospects do they open up for the development of training courses? What forms of research are involved?