Knowledge and Practice in Crisis: The Dynamics of Environmental Expertise amidst Rural Change

Abstract (English)

This panel draws attention to a current crisis of expertise in various rural parts of the world. Rural communities have struggled in recent years with climatic, ecological and demographic changes, among them the out-migration of people to urban areas and the abandonment of traditional forms of agriculture. These changes in land use and related societal disenfranchisement have contributed to an urgent crisis of environmental expertise: the loss of explicit and implicit knowledge and practices, held to varying degrees by lay persons and scientific "experts", and often gathered through long-term interactions (Turnhout et al. 2019). With local experts holding deep relations to the land (e.g. farmers, hunters, indigenous dwellers) are dwindling in number and increasingly cut off from policy-making decisions, the scale of recent, "accelerated" changes (Eriksen 2016) are leading to so-called traditional knowledge often being outpaced. Left unaddressed, this crisis will contribute to the further alienation and neglect of many rural communities. Papers on this panel consider cases that draw attention to how certain forms of knowledge are valued and others are discounted, showing connections between expertise and multiple environmental and social challenges. Using approaches from diverse fields (e.g. environmental humanities, history, ecocriticism, ecology, anthropology), the panel contributes to inter-disciplinary debates on rural change and ecological justice, and aims towards eventual impact at the policy level.