Books
Development in Transition: Rethinking Rural Futures
Edited by Kerilyn Schewel, Benjamin P. Davis, and D. Lee Miller
Development in Transition: Rethinking Rural Futures brings together scholars and practitioners who push beyond conventional paradigms for understanding rural change. Their conversations and essays offer a compelling portrait of rural places as dynamic sites of experimentation in education, migration, and resilience.
The Horizon of Human Oneness: Essays and Conversations
Edited by shahrzad sabet, benjamin p. davis, and benjamin schewel
The oneness of humankind is a contested ideal whose recognition has never been more urgent. What would it mean to take this idea seriously—not as an abstract aspiration, but as a lens for rethinking identity, justice, and our shared future? The Horizon of Human Oneness brings together philosophers, scientists, and scholars across disciplines to examine how the concept of human oneness challenges prevailing assumptions about who we are and how we might live together.
Essays
Rethinking Rural Futures
Kerilyn Schewel, Sina Rahmanian, & Vesall Nourani
A conceptual map of the competing paradigms—from modernization to agroecology to post-development — that animate contemporary debates on rural transformation, offering a guide to the diverse strategies shaping rural futures globally.
Rural Education and Rural Development
Michael Corbett
A leading sociologist of rural education explores how schools paradoxically facilitate out-migration by devaluing local knowledge, and what a curriculum rooted in community inquiry, oral history, and land can offer instead.
What Does Rural Have to Teach Us?
Brooks Lamb & Grace Olmstead
Two writers and advocates for rural America examine what gets lost when rural life is reduced to narratives of nostalgia or decline, and what practices of land attachment, care, and community have to teach a world learning to reckon with rootlessness.
Agroecology and the Future of Food Sovereignty
Miguel Altieri & Richa Kumar
Agronomist Miguel Altieri and scholar Richa Kumar explore agroecology as both a science and a political project — one that insists on integrating food, culture, ecology, and justice against the extractive logics of industrial agriculture.
Knowledge for Transformation in Colombia and Uganda
Bita correa & joseph lample
FUNDAEC's Bita Correa and Kimanya-Ngeyo's Joseph Lample trace an approach to rural development that treats it not as a modernization package to be delivered, but as an aspiration integrating material progress with moral and spiritual empowerment — from Colombia to Uganda.
Thinking and Teaching Ecological Resilience with Simone Weil
kathryn lawson
Drawing on her experience teaching Simone Weil in Halifax and her book on Weil's ecological philosophy, Kathryn Lawson explores how art, movement, and attention can cultivate a more grounded and ethically serious relationship to the natural world.