Log in to star items.
- Convenors:
-
Bradley Loewen
(NTNU-Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Kadri Leetmaa (University of Tartu)
Bianka Plüschke-Altof (Tallinn University)
Ingmar Pastak (University of Tartu)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
The panel contributes to emerging conceptualizations of smartness in non-urban contexts, shifting focus from its urban foundations to rural potentials of smartness, to critically explore and reflect on notions of smart rurality supporting rural transitions and resilience.
Description
This panel seeks to critically engage with normative and empirically founded aspects of ‘smartness’ and ‘smartification’ in rural contexts. The smart urban agenda has drawn the attention of STS scholars, such as through critical engagement with smart city futures, visions and imaginaries, innovations and socio-technical systemic change, and power and agency in smart city contexts, but STS perspectives have not yet focused on the emerging notion of smart rurality.
Moving beyond the dominant technology- and market-based readings of smartification that put the focus on urban settings, the notion of smart rurality is often either under-recognized or subjected to a development blueprint that does not necessarily fit rural realities, undermining their agency in (re)interpreting smartness and highlighting multidimensional processes of exclusion. Taking advantage of potentials for reflexivity, interdisciplinarity and intersectionality, STS scholars are poised to contribute to underlying debates in the making and doing of rural smartness.
We welcome both theoretical and empirical studies that contribute to a new conceptualization of smartification in non-urban contexts, exploring resilient futures for rural areas. The panel is meant as a discussion forum as well as a platform to bring together recent research in the field, opening opportunities for future collaborations. We invite papers that align with the major conference streams, including:
- Critical reflections on the role of smartness in rural transition and resilience, and on dominant readings of smart city and smart rurality concepts and their impacts on rural areas;
- Explorations of rural power, agency, collaboration and exclusion in ‘smart’ regional initiatives or local projects;
- Current uses of ‘smart’ in rural areas, including frontiers of rural innovation (including social and environmental), and uses of and interactions with particular technologies.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Smart rural futures are explored in four workshops with rural elderly participants, using visions and expectations to unpack normative ideals and technological assumptions around the progress and deployment of ‘smartness’ within wider societal trends of rural ageing.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores visions and expectations of smart rural futures from an elderly rural perspective in Estonia, often considered a digital leader and post-digital society, where urban-rural socio-spatial exclusion manifests in an ageing rural periphery. In this digital-by-default national context, the elderly are perceived as relatively experienced users of digital services compared to other European countries, yet constitute an underrepresented perspective on smart rural development. Smart rural futures were explored in four workshops with rural elderly participants, where so-called ‘newspapers of tomorrow’ were produced envisioning what the participants’ smart rural locality of the future can look like. We analyze these newspapers of tomorrow using visions and expectations to unpack normative ideals and technological assumptions around the progress and deployment of ‘smartness’ within wider societal trends of rural development. Based on preliminary analysis, the exercise points to the need to uncover complexity in the socio-technical imaginary of a smart society, in particular regarding its implications for rural areas and underrepresented or missing voices in shaping this future. We suggest that there is a critical tendency to focus on youth rather than elderly voices when discussing the future, even when the social fabric of rural areas disproportionately relies on elderly inhabitants.
Paper short abstract
This paper critically engages with normative and empirical dimensions of smartness in rural contexts by advancing the concept of “quiet smartness.”
Paper long abstract
This paper critically engages with normative and empirical dimensions of smartness in rural contexts by advancing the concept of “quiet smartness.” Moving beyond technology- and market-led blueprints derived from smart city agendas, it examines how smartification is enacted, interpreted, and negotiated in everyday rural practice. Empirically, the study draws on innovation biographies of eleven initiatives in Järvamaa and Hiiumaa. The findings show that rural smartness often emerges through bottom-up collaboration, informal networks, and context-sensitive uses of digital and social infrastructures. While small-scale communities and dense social ties foster experimentation and resilience, demographic decline, long distances, and uneven local governance shape processes of exclusion and limit recognition within dominant smart discourses. By conceptualizing these initiatives as forms of quiet smartness, the paper challenges urban-centric benchmarks and contributes an STS-informed perspective on power, agency, and knowledge production in rural smartification, opening space for more reflexive and resilient rural futures.
Keywords: quiet smartness, rural smartification
Paper short abstract
This paper explores smart rurality and rural innovation through a case study on the Orkney Islands. The study examines tidal energy and rural innovation, utilizing semi-structured interviews, document analysis and field observations.
Paper long abstract
The paper will elaborate the Orkney case from regional innovation system perspective centered on the tidal energy. This will contribute to notions of smart rurality as it relates to peripheral innovation and opportunities for renewable energy production.
This study employs a qualitative case study on the Orkney Islands, utilizing semi-structured interviews, document analysis and field observations to gather insights. Tidal energy technologies are highly dependent on specific ocean conditions, highlight the importance of other regional advantages as well as other forms proximity for the project’s success. The notion of rural innovation has been given more interest by researchers in recent years, particularly for building up literature that is not limited by solely from a compensation strategy-oriented analysis. Instead, recent developments have suggested peripheral locations and regions can provide other advantages that their urban counterparts lack, particularly qualities that often are overlooked in innovation studies like proximity to specific natural resources. Tidal energy’s innovation system has remained resilient despite lacking core/urban centrality and failure of key projects and actors. Through insights from the Orkney case, the paper will uncover the innovation system’s dynamics that underline its resilience, according to dimensions of proximity i.e. cognitive, institutional, organizational, social, and geographical.
Paper short abstract
This paper addresses the vision for smart and flexible electricity use in the context of rural and vulnerable electricity consumers. We address how the vulnerability and resilience of rural electricity consumers shape flexible electricity use or the prospects for adopting smart energy technologies.
Paper long abstract
The digitalized electricity grid powered by more sustainable energy sources has been under construction for the past decades. This work is coordinated by the vision of smart electricity grids where the coordination of electric loads is expected to be increasingly delegated to automated technologies. This applies also to households who are expected to consume electricity flexibly by adjusting the timing of their electricity use and by employing technologies with energy management functionality.
However, alike many other sustainability visions, the vision of smart grids and the uptake of home automation technologies may not fit into the logics of everyday life and consumption in rural areas. In this paper, we address the multiplicity of households’ encounters with flexible electricity use by using data of over 70 interviews with Finnish households, most of whom experience different degrees of energy vulnerability. The paper discusses both how vulnerability and resilience of rural electricity consumers shapes what flexible electricity use entails, and how rural and vulnerable electricity users view the uptake of energy automation or electricity contracts with variable price.
The paper proposes that there is a need to broaden the assumptions of households’ encounters with flexible consumption. Importantly, our article addresses the interlinkages between flexibility and vulnerability and calls for more work to address the increasing energy vulnerability of low-income households in rural areas both policy-wise and academically.
Paper short abstract
We rethink notions of rural smartness through a case study of human-carnivore coexistence technologies. Rural smartness includes traditional pastoral practices shaped by (more-than-human) social innovation, while co-design can connect old and new technologies for wider uptake and better use.
Paper long abstract
Smartness typically tends to be associated with urban spaces and/or technologies that are indebted to the digital turn, including but not limited to wildlife cameras, machine learning and artificial intelligence, drones, satellite-based tools, eDNA, management platforms, optimization algorithms, or more recently, Digital Twins. In our presentation we explore how alternative dimensions of smartness can be read off rural social innovation practices that emerge in the context of traditional, established, and emerging human-carnivore coexistence technologies. Specifically, using the context of human-carnivore coexistence, we present a mixed-methods approach to the study of rural innovation that aims to supplant current uses of ‘smart’ in rural areas, and discuss uses of and interactions with particular technologies. Empirically, we rely on a pan-European survey of ~1 000 European pastoralists and farmers, five focus group discussions with pastoralists, agricultural advisors and conservation scientists, and an analysis of conservation public software code co-production on the Github platform. We present two main results. Firstly, we extend established notions of rural smartness to include mid- and low-tech practices by noticing how traditional pastoralist and farming practices are enabled by (more-than-human) social innovation in rural landscapes. Secondly, in a more speculative manner, we present how co-design-based approaches to rural smartness can enable interoperability between traditional and emerging technological practices leading both to wider adoption and more successful operationalization.
Key words
Conservation technology; mixed-methods; Github; carnivores; wolves; bears; co-design