Whither Rural Commons? State Policy, Natural Resources, and Agrarian Change (NRAS 2018)

The sixth international conference of the Network of Rural and Agrarian Studies (NRAS) proposes to bring back the issue of the rural commons to the forefront of current debates on the future of agriculture and the transformation of rural India. Whereas past NRAS conferences have looked at: the multiple definitions of the rural and the agrarian (Bhopal 2014), the transformations of the rural through new technologies and new market arrangements (Allahabad 2015), the relationship between urban and rural flows of resources and people (Bhubaneswar 2017), this conference at Central University Gujarat (2018) seeks to bring together scholars to rethink—spatially, physically, socially, economically, culturally, and even philosophically—the relationship between the commons and the rural.