by the editors 23/04/2013
As mentioned in this previous post, Exploring Rurality has been around for one year this month!
We want to take a look back and shed some light on the great posts that have been published in the last year.
During the 2012 Summer Institute in Quebec, Canada, we had a daily update to the blog. Every day, one of the participants reported on what went on, what topics were discussed, where they travelled and what they saw. You can find all the posts here but we especially recommend you have a look at this one by Connor Wall or this one, where Karen and John reflect upon the rural policy of Quebec.
One of our most frequent contributors is Stuty Maskey. She participated in the Summer Institute as a student at Oregon State in 2010, but is now back working with rural matters in her native country Nepal. She is very interested in helping rural communities gain access to markets in order to sell their products, and has written about this in the posts Opportunities and challenges of market access for rural communities and Handmade in Nepal, about micro-entrepreneurs and Allo-producers in rural Nepal.
Also, we are making a collection of all the ICRPS group photos. What year did you participate? Do you see any familiar faces here? (If not, help us make the photo collection as complete as possible by e-mailing us at exploringrurality@gmail.com)
We have made a weekly-ish column called “Recently Read” where we, with the help of the readers, collect interesting articles and websites we have stumbled upon that deal with any of the topics related to rural developments, renewable energy or any other topic believed to be of interest to alumni. All Recently Read articles are collected here, but we find that some of our favourite stories are about how an Indiana farmer won against Monsanto in the US Supreme Court, do we eat more than we produce, and is that a problem? or this one: representing a variety of articles all dealing with the future of farming in one way or the other. Feel free to help out with content in future Recently Reads! Use the same e-mail address mentioned above.
Wayne Kelly has a blog on rural topics of his own, but also let’s us post some of his articles here on Exploring Rurality. He takes a particular interest in the technology side of rural development, and has written about what highspeed internet can do for rural communities and why digitally capable youth is a big potential resource for rural Canada.
We have had faculty contributing too! In January this year, Doug Ramsey wrote a piece on how participation in ICRPS has led to trans-border and trans-ocean cooperation and publication! The story is called ICRPS Collaboration: Comparative Research in Agriculture. John Bryden went to Tunisia post-revolution, and wrote the very first article on the blog: Tunisia after the Revolution which started the Arab Spring in 2011.
After the US election last year, we asked Terence Merritt if the election outcome would effect rural policy in any way. His answer was no, and these are the reasons why.
These are just a few examples. You can see the different categories that our posts have been posted to on the right, along with the tags of key words attached to them. Feel free to explore the archives and look for new or familiar names and topics.