RU-LAV Lavoro e lavoratori rurali (gruppo di lavoro SISLav), Andrea Caracausi (Univ. di Padova), Pietro Causarano (Univ. di Firenze), Michele Colucci (ISSM – CNR)

Time: September 2017
Venue: Milano, Italy
Proposals by 30 September 2016

The introduction of the pluriactivity concept marked an important turning point in rural studies. As a wider outlook of research on the countryside led the agricultural world to be more open, the care in the ways of integrating and structuring the different activities allowed to get a new point of view on the ways of socially organizing farming world and its material and symbolical spaces. Furthermore, the subject of pluriactivity has undoubtedly the merit of being in the crossroads of the most recent tracks related to renewal of rural history: it played indeed a central role in the enhanced prestige of the marginal farmers, who are no longer a powerless victims pushed in the background of the market, but actors able to disrupt the traditional picture of the still countryside, both from the geographical and the socioeconomic point of view (Bevilacqua 1990; Béaur 2015).

Especially during the 1980s, Italian and French researchers focused their attention on this phenomenon, both as a tool for investigating the most recent changes and as the subject of long-lasting analyses (ARF 1984; Garrier, Hubscher 1988; Annali 1989; De Benedictis 1990; Fanfani 1990; Sabbatucci Severini 1990; INEA 1992). In France, home of marginal farming par excellance, pluriactivity does not seem to … read more and source (Web).