Across rural Europe, traditional knowledge of the land—how to farm, manage water, read weather, and sustain local ecosystems—is quietly vanishing as people leave and old livelihoods collapse. This loss of what the researchers call “environmental expertise” is both intangible and consequential: it erodes communities’ ability to manage their own environments and leaves them voiceless in policy decisions that affect their futures. RURALEX will use “deep mapping”—a blend of anthropology, history, sound studies, and environmental humanities—to document what is being lost, how it happens, and what can be done about it. The project will work with six research teams across eight European regions, from the Azores to northern Finland, to surface knowledge held by both scientists and lay people. If successful, the research could give policymakers the tools to value local expertise alongside formal science, ensuring that rural communities are not sidelined in decisions about land use, climate adaptation, and ecological justice. This is fundamental humanities research: it will not produce a new technology or diagnostic, but it could reshape how Europe understands and responds to the quiet erosion of rural knowledge.
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RURALEX addresses the cumulative crisis of environmental expertise across rural Europe and investigates how this relates to broader processes of societal disenfranchisement. In recent years, many rural parts of Europe have struggled with the local effects of large demographic and associate ecological changes, including human out-migration and the abandonment of traditional forms of agriculture and other nature-based livelihoods. These shifts have led to significant losses in what we refer to as “environmental expertise”: loss of knowledge of the land, loss of important traditional practices, loss of tacit expertise about local environments, loss of cultural knowhow. This crisis is at once intangible and deeply impactful. RURALEX will innovate new methods to surface the loss of socio-ecological knowledges and practices, which are held by both scientific "experts" and lay persons, through long-term engagement via deep mapping. The project will determine what is being lost and its impact, how these changes take place, and what processes might be put in motion to ensure that local knowledge is adequately valued at the policy-making level. We will accomplish this via deep mapping using a suite of innovative, multispecies research methods derived from anthropology, history, literary, cultural and sound studies, and the environmental humanities. Six PIs, 4 postdocs, 3 PhD students and 6 MA students will carry out research in key parts of rural Europe: the Azores; the Pyrenees (Spain and France); the Alps (Italy); former East Germany; the Baltic states (Estonia and Latvia); Romania and Bulgaria; the UK; and northern Finland. The project will advance inter-disciplinary debates on rural change and ecological justice and will generate comparative data for engendering positive change. In so doing, RURALEX will demonstrate the importance of critical humanities approaches for addressing urgent socio-ecological crises that impact the future of remote communities across Europe.
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