Dear Colleagues,

The 6^th Annual Telciu Summer Conference seeks contributions on the history, impact and perspectives of “alternatives to development” (Arturo Escobar), rather than alternative developments and of approaches to sustainability considered in relation to rural lifeworlds, subsistence economies, and rural-urban networks. We are interested in contributions conceiving rurality as an extended field and exploring the historical, social and economic positionalities of peripheries in the context of delinking (Walter Mignolo) from liberal and neoliberal development projects and global designs that lead to “defuturing” as “a condition of mind and action that materially erodes (un-measurably) planetary finite time, thus gathering and designating the negation of ‘the being of time’, which is equally the taking away of our future” (Tony Fry). What differing histories and ideas respond to the urgent necessity of building an ecological and non-consumerist world, against models of civilization based on the extraction of life and resources? How are the projects of modernization and the continuous encroachments on the commons, natural resources and subsistence economies articulated and answered in different regions? What characterizes the modern histories of social composition of the ruralities of Europe? What are the range and limits of rural subsistence economies and their social networks? How do the “East”, the “South” and the multiple “others” of Europe, including its internal, imperial and colonial others, see or redefine their well-being? What are the realities and possibilities of change, particularly at the local and regional level? What models, counter-histories and alliances are relevant in this juncture?

We encourage submissions that engage with these topics both theoretically and in terms of specific historical experiences, across disciplines and on any scale, from the local to the global. Seeking balance between specific case studies and comparative/transnational approaches, we invite contributions engaging with, but not limited to, the following thematic foci:

• Reconceptualizing Peasantries, Reassessing Modernities
• Rural Sustainable Economies and Subsistence Economies
• Degrowth and Sustainability
• Land Grabbing and Resistance
• Alternative Regionalisms and Ruralities of Europe
• Social Histories of Rurality
• Rurality and Transnational Flows
• Rurality and Technology
• Interactions between Rurality and Urbanity
• Capitalism, Socialism, and Cooperativism in the Rural World
• Modernities, Temporalities, and Ruralities
• Decolonial Options to the Rural-Urban Divide
• Vernacular Religion and Peasant Culture
• Agriculture and Socio-Economic Modernization
• Folk-Populisms, Nationalisms, and Imperialisms
• Projects of Internal Colonialism and Peasant Resistance
• Thinking from the Rural Periphery
• Reagrarianization and the “End of History”

Dr. Manuela Boatcă
Dr. Valer Simion Cosma
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Social Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

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• Rurality
• Modernity
• Postsocialism
• Decoloniality
• Degrowth