RURALEX is a three-year research project that studies the cumulative crisis of environmental expertise across Europe’s rural areas. We are a team of researchers and practitioners investigating how shifts in people’s knowledge about the environment shape social, cultural, and ecological challenges facing local communities today.
A collaborative project investigating contemporary rural experiences, infrastructures and narratives through situated research.
Across Europe, rural regions are undergoing major transformations. Population decline, urban migration, and the loss of traditional agricultural practices have disrupted long-standing relationships between people and their environments. This is leading to many forms of ecological know-how transforming, fading, and being generated. Our research spans diverse sites, from the Spanish Pyrenees to southeastern England, from the Bulgarian Danube basin to the northern cost of Norway. Using long-term ethnographic and archival methods, we document how environmental knowledge evolves across generations and landscapes. We also develop innovative tools to capture stories, sounds, and images that reflect how people relate to their environments. We hope to show how better understanding local knowledge can help address Europe’s pressing ecological and social challenges — and why the humanities are essential to understanding our shared future.
Bureaucratic forest management marginalizes traditional knowledge. As climate change raises the threat of megafires, this project uses ethnographic fieldwork to explore and identify alternative ways to build fire-resilient landscapes and communities.
Socialist Romania and Bulgaria introduced Asian carp as a protein source. It escaped into the Danube, becoming an invasive species. We examine fish reproduction and infrastructure, tracking how neoliberal reforms reshape interspecies relations.
Agricultural and environmental practices in Mallorca are changing and so are broader political and social debates. This case study explores resilience and adaptation in labour, trade, and livelihoods, while documenting past agricultural systems and landscapes.
Abandonment of traditional agriculture, depopulation, and rewilding have turned the landscape into a site of political contention. These transformations spark conflict as local actors negotiate shifting land use and identities.
Reed beds and flooded meadows along the Kasari River support major Arctic bird migration and foster artisanal innovations. Biodiversity conservation, cultural tradition, and economic viability are negotiated, revealing tensions and adaptations in managing this distinctive landscape and its livelihoods.
At Knepp, grazing and beaver reintroduction are shaping new wetlands, raising questions about how social values guide future licensing. At Railway Land Wildlife Trust, Lewes, chalk stream restoration created biodiverse wetlands and fosters ecocentric cultures.
Using the spread of invasive pink salmon as a focal point, the case study foregrounds curatorial practice, local art history and educational initiatives, as a way of activating local knowledge of human–environment relations.
Around Bitterfeld-Wolfen in eastern Germany, restored lakes, forests, and recreation landscapes mask a recent history of coal mining and pollution. The project addresses emerging land-use conflicts, particularly around wind farms and solar parks, and their contemporary socio-political significance.
Core project team and collaborators.
Our panel 'Desirable Strangers: Historical, Anthropological, and Scientific Perspectives on Species Translocation', convened for the 14th European Society for Environmental History Conference (Salzburg, 7-10 September 2027), invites papers examining the planned movement of species across territories from the modern period to the present. Focusing on translocation as a socio-environmental process, the panel explores its political, economic, scientific, and ecological dimensions. Contributions are welcomed from environmental history, anthropology, STS, conservation, biology, and related fields, particularly those addressing infrastructures, knowledge systems, political economy, ecological outcomes, and interdisciplinary methods. Abstract deadline: 1 October 2026.
Now published in TURBA: The Journal for Global Practices in Live Arts Curation, this letter by RURALEX postdoc Lucy Sabin reflects on her fieldwork in Sussex. Artists and writers lead community walks at Lewes Railway Land Nature Reserve, facilitating collective attunement to changing relations between land, bodies, memory, and imagination. Nature recovery, Sabin illustrates, has intangible and atmospheric dimensions.
Similar to rewilding, la libre évolution is about allowing ecological processes to unfold without continuous human control. RURALEX member Lucy Sabin explains the nature recovery strategy, reporting on the third symposium organised by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Lucy explores how 'instruments of governance' (here: measurement, law, and mapping) are shaping la libre évolution, its current debates and future possibilities. This article is published open access in peer-reviewed, ecocentric journal The Ecological Citizen.
Estonian Naturalists’ Society (Eesti Looduseuurijate Selts) was founded in 1853 and over time became the biggest scientific society in Estonia. Postgraduate researcher Stefan Ottens presented his ongoing research on the topic at the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) Conference in 2026. "Trustees were a diverse group of people" writes Ottens "from carpenters to car drivers, teachers to high school students, who were united by one ideal: the love for nature".
For general inquiries about the project, collaborations, press or access to materials, please contact the team.
