RHN 15/2025 | Call, EURHO
Organisers: Francesca Uleri (University of Bolzano), Federica Viganò (University of Bolzano) and Monica Musolino (University of Messina)
Session at Rural History 2025, 9–12 September 2025, Coimbra, Portugal
Deadline for submissions: 20 January 2025
Call for Papers:
Understanding contemporary rural energy transitions between decarbonization strategies and localized rural changes
Session S44 at Rural History 2025
Currently, in the midst of a progressive and solicited shift towards decarbonization and renewable energy, rural areas are playing a crucial role in guiding this transition. Various rural development projects and contributions highlight the significance of rural areas in fulfilling ambitious local commitments to combat climate change while also generating economic and social benefits. Globally, rural areas provide resources and innumerable sites (e.g., hydroelectric plants, agri-solar farms, etc.) for fueling the transition, thus strongly influencing its local advancements. Similarly, energy transitions have the potential to reshape the physical and social (material/immaterial) profile of rural areas. Rural places experience direct materializations of a shift to post-carbon technologies. Renewable electricity sites and infrastructures change the appearance and function of the rural, the way in which it is perceived and lived by residents, conceived by local policy-makers, and perceived by non-residents (e.g., rural users, tourists, temporary workers, etc.). This can result in multiple and contrasting energy and rural development decision-making processes, as well as in conflicting residents and non-residents’ imaginaries about the rural place and associated energy transition dynamics. This mirrors – but also depends on – the co-productive relationship that binds energy and society. Energy availability, its production and consumption models, determine the types of lifestyles that are possible, symmetrically societal structures and processes (e.g., public policies, community activism, etc.) establish and influence the quality, location, and distribution of energy resources. Despite evident interdependencies between discourses of the evolution of rurality (and rural differentiation) and the ones related to Energy Transitions (ETs), these latter remain overwhelmed by metro-centered narratives and urban sociotechnical analyses. The analysis of intertwined changing rurality(-ies) and ETs remains markedly limited, and their outcomes almost completely underestimated. Notwithstanding the relevance and incisiveness of the overlap between new energyscapes and the social construction of rurality (in terms of productive vocation, quality of life, local cultural identity and traditions, place attachment, landscape care, etc.), the conceptualization of a “rural energy transition’”, is still scarcely mentioned in social research. The session seeks to shed light on the interconnections between ETs and rural change. It presents (i) theoretical frameworks that help to conceptualize and understand contemporary rural energy transitions; (ii) different and “localized” cases of contemporary rural energy transitions in both the global North and global South, that help to understand how new energyscapes are embedded in – and adapted to – specific territories through forms of contestation and emancipation. Particular attention is given to historical and cultural factors influencing the differentiation of new energy landscapes in rural areas.
Empirical cases can address the following themes, without being limited to them:
• ETs and commodification of rural resources;
• ETs and resignification of wasted lands;
• Imaginaries of rurality and ETs;
• Rural ETs and new technologies;
• Post-productivism and rural economy differentiation: multifunctional agriculture and energy production;
• Left behind places, ETs and green capitalism;
• Trajectories of energy democracy in rural areas;
• ETs and social impacts in rural contexts;
• Survival or emancipatory initiatives in rural areas and ETs;
• Path dependency development model in rural areas.
Proposals should be submitted here https://ruralhistory2025.org/call-for-papers/ until 20 January 2025.