Del 29 de julio al 4 de agosto de 2012, tendrá lugar en Lisboa el XIII World Congress of Rural Sociology, que versará sobre "The new rural world: from crises to opportunities".

Miembros del Grupo Histagra participarán en el Congreso con las siguintes comunicaciones:

Lourenzo Fernández Prieto y Pedro Gabriel Gonçalves Silva: "Peasants against the 'ground eating dredge': a socio-environmental conflict approach to peasant collective action against mining in Portugal (1974-1980)"

Abstract:

This paper presents a socio-environmental conflict in a Portuguese rural community (1974-1980) in the aftermath of the 25th April Revolution that overthrew the Estado Novo dictatorship. The conflict focuses on collective peasant mobilization against a mining company prompt to dredge the highly valued plots surrounding the village. The conflict brought up memories of past environmental depredation in the first half of the 20th Century (done by open-cast mining). Memory and experience of past environmental depredation were combined with the opening of political opportunity structures during the democratic transition. In the conflict, local contenders rested their opposition to mining on the defense of small-scale family agriculture, claiming the symbolic and material relevance of agricultural resources and the idea of mining as poverty generator, challenging industrial development progress models. The conflict under scrutiny helps reframe Portuguese local resistance against mining and the relationship between collective action and structural political change.

Daniel Lanero Táboas y Alba Díaz Geada: "Modernizing the countryside: the agrarian extension service in francoist Spain (1955-1975)"

Abstract:

The Agrarian Extension Service (AES) was created in 1955 as a new instrument of the Francoist agrarian policy. Initially, its primary objective was to increase agrarian productivity and thus improve the standard of living in rural areas, based on the modernization philosophy of the Green Revolution. Our aim with this paper is to present the main characteristics of the agrarian extensionism in Spain, -its origins, objectives, methods and evolution- during the last decades of the Francoist dictatorship. In this occassion, we are going to focus our attention in the important role that Rural Sociology played in the theory behind the AES, in the training process of the extension agents, and in how they interacted with rural communities...