Read the protocol for Research & Study Groups
Four Research & Study Groups have been selected in 2026.
Follow the Research & Study Group on Generational Renewal in Agriculture via the website esrsgenren.wordpress.com. The group email is: genrenesrs@gmail.com
The second group is Southern and Mediterranean Europe: Social Change, Challenges and Opportunities.
Convenor: Alessandra Corrado
Understanding rural survival requires examining not only the structural challenges facing rural territories, but also the agency, resilience, and room for maneuver within local communities. Given the long-term nature of ongoing crises, there is a growing risk of a deepening divide between Northern and Southern/Mediterranean European rural areas. This heightens the urgent need for a dedicated research network focused on Southern and Mediterranean European countryside, exploring viable pathways for sustainability, resilience, and success in an evolving context. This Rural Study Group (RSG) pursues a dual mandate: first, to foster critical debate and analysis on the structural restructuring of rural territories in Southern and Mediterranean Europe amid ongoing crises; and second, to develop joint research proposals to enable future comparative studies across the region.
Key research themes include:
• Social Inequalities: Analyzing the emergence of new axes of rural stratification and vulnerability.
• Empowerment & Agency: Exploring processes of community empowerment and disempowerment.
• Resilience & Mobility: Investigating adaptive strategies, including internal and international migration flows.
• Rural Governance: Examining emerging models of local and regional governance.
• Rural Welfare: Deepening comparative analyses of social welfare provision and safety nets.
• Livelihoods: Investigating changing rural livelihood strategies and economic diversification.
For further information, please visit https://mediterraneaneurope.wordpress.com
The third Research & study Group is The Sociology of Rural Entrepreneurship
Convenors: Gary Bosworth, Leanne Townsend, Gesine Tiutjer
This RSG is interested in the intersection of a sociology of entrepreneurship as an ontological and methodological framework, and rural entrepreneurship as an epistemological field with an emerging research identity, agenda and coherence. More specifically the RSG encourages the application of sociological theory and the utilisation of sociological methods, to allow deeper, more contextual understandings of rural entrepreneurship to emerge. Some of the bigger questions that will shape the future activities of the RSG include:
1. How are rural contexts experienced, interpreted and interacted with, as entrepreneurial superstructures?
2. How and why do rural entrepreneurs engage in forms of agency in order to capitalise on opportunities and challenge constraints that exist within rural contexts?
3. How and why do ‘key’ sociological themes such as class and gender relate to and create unique challenges and opportunities for rural entrepreneurs?
4. How do rural entrepreneurs view and relate to non-rural entrepreneurial structures and actors; and how do notions of power and hierarchy shape network interactions between rural and non-rural entrepreneurs?
5. Recognising that rural entrepreneurs are mobile and fluid, who move between rural and non-rural contexts, how are new (e.g. urban) entrepreneurial ecosystems experienced by entrepreneurs who leave the rural, as part of moving life-courses.
Finally, the fourth Research & Study Groups is Re-invigorating the Rural Economy and Society Research and Study Group (UK)
Convenor: Steven Emery
This group—re-energized by Exeter’s Centre for Rural Policy Research (CRPR) in response to Michael Winter’s 2025 lecture—aims to revive cross-institutional and multidisciplinary intellectual exchange on “big picture” thinking in UK rural and agrarian research. Drawing inspiration from the influential Rural Economy and Society Study Group of the 1980s and 1990s, the initiative brings together geographically and disciplinarily dispersed scholars to formulate updated research frameworks, address under-represented regional and national-scale questions, and establish a collaborative, contemporary vision for the field’s future. The initial objectives are:
- To reconnect diverse and often dispersed rural researchers from across the UK and to provide a space for academic exchange
- To re-focus our attention on ‘big picture’ regional and national rural issues, which have been under-represented in recent research and are best addressed through collective endeavour
- To re-visit the prior work and operating procedures of the former RESSG to evaluate what may be achievable in present circumstances
- To take forward collaborative research activities such as convening panels at the ESRS conferences, working on joint funding bids and preparing edited volumes or special issues
For further information and membership inquiries, please contact the convenors.