Knowledge in Crisis: The Dynamics of Environmental Expertise amidst Rural Change

RURALEX addresses the cumulative crisis of environmental expertise across rural Europe and investigates how this relates to broader processes of societal disenfranchisement. In recent years, many rural parts of Europe have struggled with the local effects of large demographic and associated ecological changes, including human out-migration and the abandonment of traditional forms of agriculture and other nature-based livelihoods. These shifts have led to significant losses in what we refer to as “environmental expertise”: loss of knowledge of the land, loss of important traditional practices, loss of tacit expertise about local environments, loss of cultural knowhow. This crisis is at once intangible and deeply impactful. RURALEX will address those profound changes in socio-ecological knowledges and practices, held by both scientific “experts” and lay persons, through long-term ethnographic engagement and deep mapping tools that will be developed collaboratively by the project partners. The project will determine what is being lost and its impact, how these changes take place, and what processes might be put in motion to ensure that local knowledge is adequately valued at the policy-making level. To do so the project draws on multispecies perspectives grounded in anthropology, history, literary, cultural and sound studies, and the environmental humanities. RURALEX is a consortium of six universities in Finland, Estonia, Romania, the UK, and Spain, beside Norway, and comparative and collaborative methods will be employed throughout the project.