Funding for a new research project on social disadvantage in rural areas

The project is part of a bilateral cooperation with the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, central research funding organisation in Germany) supports the German part of the project with about 800,000 Euro. The scientific partners in Prague receive respective funding by the Czech Science Foundation.

The collaborative research project is called “Social disadvantage in rural peripheries in Czechia and eastern Germany: opportunity structures and individual agency in a comparative perspective”. The researchers are interested, on the one hand, in rural patterns of social disadvantage in the two post-socialist transition societies. On the other, regional and local coping capacities as well as individual agency will be analysed by way of in-depth case studies. The project adopts a mixed-method design by conducting area-based statistical secondary analyses including accessibility analyses of basic services as well as expert interviews with regional stakeholders and qualitative problem-centred interviews with members of socially disadvantaged groups. The project wants to contribute to the academic debates on peripheralisation and rural restructuring in conceptual, methodological and empirical terms.

Contact persons:

PD Dr. Andreas Klärner

Dr. Annett Steinführer