Rethinking the rural North through environmental literature, film, and TV

This international conference gathers junior and senior researchers to explore the multi-layered ways in which today’s rural landscapes, troubled by human impact, are portrayed in literary and cinematic narratives, and how human environmental responsibility is negotiated.

The view of rural areas as a resource for human use has come under scrutiny. Overfishing, soil depletion and forest degradation are serious environmental problems that challenge the idea of resource extraction as the engine of rural development. Also, increasing urbanisation and growing rural exodus put pressure on rural areas.

How do literary and film works question the taken-for-granted and often invisible uses of resources? Which aesthetic means are deployed to depict today’s rural landscapes troubled by human impact? And which alternative forms of living and working in rural areas, based on non-extractive land and sea use, are brought to the fore?

This conference starts from the premise that cultural representations and imaginations have great potential to reflect, archive, and shape our relation to the environment. As a medium of lived experience, they can transport us, both cognitively and emotionally, into an awareness of our dependency on healthy ecosystems.

By highlighting the crucial role played by cultural imaginations in determining what aspects of contemporary rural Scandinavia are foregrounded, which rural voices, including those of nonhuman actors, are listened to, and how these voices might mobilize the rural socially and politically, the conference aspires to contribute both to the cultural turn in pastoral studies and the rustic turn in cultural studies, as well as to scarce ecocritical conceptualizations within these fields.

Download the conference poster.

Keynote

The keynote lecture on ‘Rural Hinterlands’ will be held by Prof. Dr. Esther Peeren, Academic Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, and leader of the ERC-funded project Imagining the Rural in a Globalizing World.

Programme

Sign-up

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