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GAA (German Anthropological Association) Conference

Rurality and Future-Making

The conference brings together three GAA (German Anthropological Association) regional working groups – Anthropology of Europe, the Middle East and the Mediterranean – to explore rurality as a reserve and resource for future-making in their interconnected and transnational regionalities. It invites participants to explore situated practices of future-making in order to trace how rurality is achieved, marked and (de-)stabilized in different places. Through concrete ethnographic case studies, we aim at conceptualizing the ‘rural’ beyond well-known center-periphery dichotomies. Well aware that ‘the rural’ and ‘the urban’ can only be “understood as a continuum irreducible to the polarity of one or the other term” (Chio 2017:362); we use the rural lens to create an anthropological laboratory (Albera 1999) which enables us to “write against established categories” (Horden 2014:9). This conference invites researchers to reflect on the various perpetuated methodological urbanisms, ruralisms and regionalisms, i.e. the persisting preoccupation of ethnographers with urban spaces and research in geographically and/ or politically bounded categories like Europe, the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

Convenors: 
Simon Holdermann (Cologne), 
Christoph Lange (Cologne)
, Katharina Lange (Berlin), 
Michaela Schäuble (Bern)
, Andreas Streinzer (St. Gallen/Frankfurt), Jelena Tošić (St. Gallen/Vienna), 
Martin Zillinger (Cologne)

Organization:
DGSKA, TRR 228, GSSC, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at UoC, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO)

Venue:
Tagungsraum, Seminargebäude, Albertus-Magnus Platz, University of Cologne (UoC)

Contact: 
Christoph Lange (rural-future-making@uni-koeln.de)