Acknowledgements
The Special Issue emerges out of the project “Changing Development Strategies and Cultural Spaces of Latvia’s Rural Inhabitants” financed by the European Social Fund. Project Nr.2009/0222/1DP/1.1.1.2.0/09/APIA/VIAA/087.
Notes
1 See http://www.latvija2030.lv/upload/latvija2030_lv.pdf.
2 Keith Halfacree argues that sociological definitions of the rural use statistical data to confirm popular perception of the rural. In other words, the rural is first defined intuitively and thereafter statistically, therefore presenting culturally specific assumptions as objective knowledge (Citation1993, 24).
3 Interview conducted by Dace Dzenovska, March 2010, Latgale.
4 All quotes from researchers in the remainder of the text are from this discussion, conducted in Riga, 24 October 2011.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Dace Dzenovska
Dace Dzenovska holds a PhD and an MA in Social Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in Social Theory from New York University. She is currently a Senior Researcher/Marie Curie Fellow at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford. Her research interests pertain to the politics of difference in post-socialist contexts, specifically the ways in which particular ethical and political sensibilities and forms of sociality get constituted and contested in the context of the state-building and European integration in Latvia.
Guntra A. Aistara
Guntra A. Aistara received her PhD from the School of Natural Resources and Environment from the University of Michigan. Her research is in environmental anthropology on the themes of organic agriculture movements, agrobiodiversity and seed sovereignty, and the political ecology of free trade agreements. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Policy at the Central European University in Budapest.