New exclusionary politics are generating deepening inequalities, jobless ‘growth’, climate chaos, and social division. The Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI) is focused on the social and political processes in rural spaces that are generating alternatives to regressive, authoritarian politics.
The initiative is a collaboration between the ESRC STEPS Centre (Brighton), the ISS (The Hague), PLAAS (Cape Town), Cornell University (Ithaca), CUNY (New York) and others, including the Transnational Institute. We are inviting researchers and activists from around the world to join us in exploring the diverse contours of the current conjuncture in different rural settings, as well as the forms of resistance and diversity of alternatives being generated for more emancipatory futures. For more information about the initiative, including contact details and details about the ERPI framework, visit the ISS Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative web site. There you will also find details of a small grants call, which is currently live, with a closing date of 30 June 2017.
Also, to kick off a new Journal of Peasant Studies forum series on ‘Authoritarian Populism in the Rural World’, an open access article has just been published in the JPS titled ‘Emancipatory Rural Politics: Confronting Authoritarian Populism’. This outlines some of the thinking behind the initiative.
POLLEN 