TRANSITION – Centre for Changing Urban and Rural Lives

TRANSITION Winter School 2027: Urban–Rural Space: Culture, Language, History

TRANSITION invites PhD students and postdoctoral researchers to join an intensive Winter School in Copenhagen.

Our Winter School explores how urban and rural spaces are shaped, imagined, and experienced across culture, language, and history. Across Europe and beyond, relations between urban and rural areas are being reconfigured in ways that are economic, cultural, political, and deeply personal. Questions of mobility, belonging, identity, and inequality are often articulated through ideas of “the urban” and “the rural” — yet these categories are far from stable.

Rather than treating urban and rural as fixed opposites, we want to bring them into conversation across disciplines. Therefore we ask how different fields approach, define, and study these spaces — and what becomes visible when perspectives from human geography, urban studies, literary studies, cultural analysis, and sociolinguistics are combined.

Throughout the Winteer School, we will move between conceptual discussions, methodological exploration, Data Labs, group work, and informal exchanges as well as a joint museum visit in Copenhagen. You will engage closely with leading international scholars and collaborative reflect on how different approaches can inform your own research projects.

We have invited Michael Woods (Aberystwyth University), Dorothee Brantz (TU Berlin), Ruth King (University of York), Jason Finch (Åbo Akademi University), and Esther Peeren (University of Amsterdam) to join us as lecturers for our Winter School. Together, they bring perspectives from rural geography, urban history, sociolinguistics, literary urban studies, and cultural analysis.

Throughout the week, you are invited to connect your own research to the themes of the Winter School and to learn from each other’s perspectives. The program culminates in a small conference, where you present your research in dialogue with the Winter School’s themes and receive feedback from other participants and of course from our invited lecturers as well as TRANSITION’s Lead Investigators.

You will gain new conceptual tools for thinking beyond simple urban–rural distinctions, get insight into methodological approaches across disciplines, receive structured feedback on your research, will experience presenting your work in an interdisciplinary setting, and gain a network of peers and senior scholars working on related questions.

We are looking for early-career researchers who are interested in engaging critically with urban–rural relations and in developing their work in dialogue with other disciplines and perspectives.