The Andrew Errington Memorial Lecture

Rural Futures: Dreams, Dilemmas and Dangers

Professor Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, Wageningen University, The Netherlands

Introduced by Professor Wendy Purcell, Vice-Chancellor, University of Plymouth

1 April 2008, Sherwell Centre, University of Plymouth, 18.15 for 18.45.

We cordially invite you to the 2008 Andrew Errington Memorial Lecture, at the University of Plymouth.  Admission is free, and the lecture is followed by light refreshments.  Please let us know you intend to come by emailing Susie.bissell@plymouth.ac.uk as soon as possible. 

The lecture is part of the conference ‘Rural Futures: Dreams, Dilemmas, Dangers’ which takes place over the subsequent three days: please go to http://www.ruralfuturesconference.org/  for details of the programme.  Come for a day if you can’t manage all three.  Bursaries are available for ‘rural citizens’ voluntary organisations, etc.  Exhibition stands and poster papers are welcome.

The lecture

In this lecture, Jan Douwe van der Ploeg will present an overview of the European debates on rural development, suggesting that it is a differentiated and contested process that offers the possibility of shaping new rural futures. He will argue that rural development is a process that is being driven forward by a hitherto hardly recognized process, in and through which considerable parts of Europe’s farming and rural populations are being reconstituted as ‘new peasantries’. At the same time this process runs counter to, and offers alternatives to, imperial arrangements that are increasingly suffocating rural life.  After discussing some of the ‘dreams, dilemmas and dangers’ for rural society, van der Ploeg will illustrate how rural development processes, particularly the reconstitution of rural regions, are actively challenging different forms of ‘Empire’.

The speaker

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg (1950) currently holds the chair of Transition Processes at Wageningen University. Previously he held the chair of Rural Sociology. He has been a member, for eight years, of the Council for the Rural Areas. At European level he participated, amongst others, in the Rural Development Conferences at Cork and Salzburg. 

Recently, van der Ploeg published 'The Virtual Farmer' (2003; Royal van Gorcum). In this study it is argued that knowledge on agriculture as produced and accumulated by expert systems such as universities and ministries of agriculture, is increasingly at odds with reality. Thus, the implementation of this knowledge in different domains of agrarian and rural policy increasingly triggers a range of frictions and new contradictions.

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg is actively involved in several farmers' initiatives (as the new 'environmental cooperatives' in the Netherlands) that try to go beyond the boundaries as imposed by the reigning expert systems.

Andrew Errington

Andrew Errington was Professor of Rural Development in the University of Plymouth until his sudden and untimely death in 2003.  He was a respected academic as well as engaging directly with the processes of rural development in the region, and is greatly missed by academic colleagues as well as professionals working in rural areas in the ‘real world’.  His work laid the foundations for the Rural Futures Unit, and it is fitting that he is remembered through the headline lecture of the 2008 Rural Futures Conference.

Susie Bissell

Research Assistant

Rural Futures Unit

7 Kirkby Place

University of Plymouth

Drake Circus

Plymouth

Devon

PL4 8AA

Tel: 01752 238462

email: susie.bissell@plymouth.ac.uk