7 June 2024

9:00–9:30: Welcome and Introduction
Paul Betts (St Antony’s, University of Oxford): Welcome
Anette Schlimm (St Antony’s, University of Oxford/University of Heidelberg):
Introductory Remarks: Developing the Rural – Landmarks and Transformations in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century

9:30–11:00 Panel 1: High modernist agriculture planning policies
Chair: Paul Betts

Venus Bivar (St Anne’s College, University of Oxford): French Agriculture Policy in High Modernity

Margot Lyautey (HSU Hamburg): A “Blond Revolution”? Maize and the Intensification of Agriculture in East Germany and France (1950s–1980s)

Courtney Campbell (University of Birmingham): Fixing the Region as Rural: Bureaucrats, Social Activists, and International Development Aid in the Brazilian Northeast, 1950s and 1960s

11:00–11:30: Coffee/Tea

11:30–1:00: Panel 2: Village communities as experimental spaces
Chair: Katherine Lebow

Heiner Grunert (University of Basel): Village councils, cooperatives, health stations and fire services: Modernizing village communities in Poland and Yugoslavia 1910s–1930s

Sam Hillyard (University of Lincoln): Changing understanding and expectations of the village community in contemporary Britain

Clemens Six (University of Groningen): Social engineering in decolonizing rural spaces: India, British-Malaya, and the FAO, 1947–1979

1:00–2:30 Lunch

2:30–4:00: Panel 3 New Governing Perspectives
Chair: Nick Stargardt

Caitlin Scott (University of East Anglia): Governance and Disciplining through Project Management in Rural Development

Emiel Geurts (LMU Munich): Rethinking the Rural: The Environment and Rurality in the “Green” Reorientation of the Common Agricultural Policy, 1970s–1995

Henrik Schwanitz (Institute of Saxon History and Cultural Anthropology, Dresden): „Sozialistische Landeskultur“. New planning programmes for a modernised, socialist landscape in the GDR

8 June 2024

9:00–10:30: Panel 4: Transformations/Co-Transformations
Chair: Aliénor Ballangé

Annett Steinführer (Thünen-Institut, Brunswick): From divergence to convergence? Social change in East German villages between the 1990s and the 2010s

Tine Haubner (University of Bielefeld): Informal Economies and Social Participation in Rural Poverty Areas in East and West Germany

Mihai Varga (FU Berlin): The World Bank and the plan of an entrepreneurial revolution for the post-communist countryside, 1990-2003

10:30–11:00: Coffee/Tea

11:00–12:00 Round Table: Transforming Rural development and planning. Actors, Concepts, Interdependencies
Chair: Patricia Clavin

Graham Avery (Oxford) / Amalia Ribi Forclaz (Geneva Graduate Institute) / Michael Woods (Aberystwyth University)

Final discussion, concluding remarks, prospects