Rural History 2023 – Call for Papers

 11-14 September 2023, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Panel No. 66

Crossing micro with macro: data to observe and transform agriculture (19^th century to the present)

Organizers: Federico D’Onofrio (University of Vienna), Margot Lyautey (Helmut-Schmidt Universität Hamburg), Niccolò Mignemi (CNRS, UMR 8236 - LIED, Université Paris Cité)

The sixth biennial conference of the European Rural History Organisation (EURHO) will take place on September 11^th-14^th 2023 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. We are looking for paper proposals to complete our accepted panel entitled Crossing micro with macro: data to observe and transform agriculture (19^th century to the present).

Presentation of the panel: Observers of agriculture in the 19^th and 20^th century greatly insisted on variety and locality as defining traits of rural life. They frequently questioned the appropriateness of generalization and statistical averages to capture the peculiarities of activities that were by necessity rooted in highly differentiated geographical, geological and socio-cultural landscapes. The aim of this session is to discuss the challenges posed by local varieties and scale to the observation of agriculture. Agricultural statistics, farm accounting, farm surveys, and inquiries made available a huge amount of information on land use, farm structure, the management of inputs, crop and animal output. Most of these data were collected at farm level and/or in cooperation with farmers. Agricultural experts made data homogeneous and comparable, creating horizontal datasets, and (more or less) regular time-series. They thus created specific taxonomy and/or built up typologies. The countryside was made legible for scientific debates and policy interventions.

However, this narrative leaves under-explored the relation between the micro level of data collection and the macro level of generalizations. How did the variety of situations at the micro level transform into the simplified synthesis at the macro level? How does the global picture scale up observations beyond the local and give them broader significance? How did specific analytical frameworks (i.e. spatial proximity, social differentiation, crop specialization) enable micro data to underpin arguments about the macro level, or vice versa?

Depending on the final goal of their assessment and the characteristics of the regions and societies they observed, historical actors have designed various strategies for generalization. Hence, some approaches were more objectifying than others and relied more on quantification, other approaches aimed more at describing farms and creating taxonomies. General economic trends in agriculture were often inferred by looking at individual farms, characterized as typical, or from a small and non-random sample. Conversely, economists and statisticians deducted particularity from general data, with the aim of adapting policies to particular territories, crops or types of farms. Some of the observation and inference methods derived from economics, sociology, and other human and natural sciences, but they all had to be adapted to the peculiarities of agricultural life.

Therefore, for this panel session, we invite prospective contributors to investigate the changing-scales effect in the production and the utilization of data to observe and transform the variety of agriculture. They will be asked to focus on the interactions between micro situations and general narratives or, vice versa, on the ability of macro frameworks to design local diversity. Papers will thus bring to the fore the practices of generalization, deduction, classification, and measurement in the creation of knowledge that – over the last two centuries and still today and in different geographical contexts – shaped and nourished the development of state plans, unions’ agendas, local and regional programs.

If you are interested, you can submit your paper proposal here: http://hiphi.ubbcluj.ro/rural/call-for-papers/

A paper proposal must include a title, the full name and affiliation of the author (and coauthors), an abstract (max. 2000 characters) which should include the key points of the research, its scope, and its approach. The deadline for paper proposals is the 31^st of January 2023. The letters of acceptance will be sent out until the 28^th of February 2023.

If you have any question regarding the panel you can contact Margot Lyautey ([log in to unmask]).

For more information, see the conference website: http://hiphi.ubbcluj.ro/rural/