Home > Sterling Community > Rural Heritage Institute

Rural Heritage Institute

rhi

Is Local Enough? 2010 Rural Heritage Institute: CALL FOR PROPOSALS

The Third Annual Rural Heritage Institute at Sterling College:

Is Local Enough? Promises and Limits of Local Action

June 17-20, 2010

Are there limits to local thinking? What is the relationship between rural and local? What is the role of local knowledge in an age of globalization? How are rural regions across the world implicated in global issues?

Panel, workshop, presentation, and roundtable proposals are solicited for Is Local Enough? Promises and Limits of Local Action from June 17th-20th at Sterling College in Craftsbury Common, Vermont. Part of Sterling’'s annual Rural Heritage Institute, this event will explore the developing dialogue between local and global concerns as it applies to economy, agriculture, history, food, culture, and rural identity.

Located at the heart of Vermont'’s Northeast Kingdom, Is Local Enough? capitalizes on the model of community and experiential learning at the center of the Sterling College curriculum and apparent throughout the surrounding communities.

Each year, The Rural Heritage Institute draws participants who are passionate about solidifying the connections among community, academic scholarship, and meaningful action in the field. The intimate atmosphere of the Institute (between 50-75 participants) enables productive conversations among a broad range of practitioners, scholars, community members, and under/graduate students who share an interest in exploring the intersections of local, regional, and global issues – particularly as manifested in the rural Northeast.

Is Local Enough? Promises and Limits of Local Action will be filled with four days of workshops, field sessions, seminar panels, roundtables, presentations, featured speakers, and hands-on experiences.

You are invited to submit proposals for this immersive and interdisciplinary Institute in areas including (but not limited to):

Bioregionalism	Local Action
Sustainable Agriculture	Glocalism
Farmstead and Folk Arts	Traditional Foodways
The Rural Artisan	The Northern Forest
Globalization	Regional Identity
Rural Literature	Mapping Place
Oral History and Community Memory	Local and Regional Economies
New Economy Agriculture	Radical Consumption
Slow Food Gender and Rural Identity	Agrarianism
Cottage Industries	The Rhetoric of Place
Community-Based Food Systems	Rural Ethnic Traditions
Sense of Place

Please send one-page proposals to Pavel Cenkl at Sterling College at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it by March 12, 2010

For the past two years Sterling has hosted the Rural Heritage Institute: a four-day academic conference. The Institute capitalizes on Sterling’s integrative model of community learning and experiential academics. Sterling College, located only 30 miles from the Canadian border in the heart of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, is an ideal place in which to explore interwoven threads of place, culture, and community in the fabric of the region’s agricultural and land-use heritage. RHI effectively integrates aspects of the Sterling College mission of environmental stewardship and fostering a sustainable community-based approach to global issues through “plain hard work” with an innovative approach to experience-based education. A natural extension of Sterling College’s forestry, draft horse, and sustainable agriculture programs — as well as its integrative community-based curriculum — RHI can serve as the base for a cross-disciplinary exploration of rural heritage in Vermont and across northern New England.

Visit the RHI Blog http://ruralheritageinstitute.blogspot.com/

Past RHI Conferences

Summer 2009

Food, Farms, & Community: Rural America’s Local Food Renaissance

The Second Annual Rural Heritage Institute at Sterling College

Clark Wolf, author of American Cheeses: The Best Regional, Artisan, and Farmhouse Cheeses, Who Makes Them, and Where to Find Them

This past summer found some of the nation’s leading scholars, farmers, entrepreneurs, policy makers, artists, and activists at the Food, Farms, and Community: Rural America’s Local Food Renaissance from June 16th-18th.

The conference sought to balance the changing connections between rural communities and their food sources with a long tradition of community-based agriculture. The local food theme was highlighted by three days of discussions, field trips, and hands-on workshops that connect participants with practitioners at the leading edge of sustainable food systems, organic agriculture, and working communities.

Selected Presentations

Clark Wolf, author of American Cheeses: The Best Regional, Artisan, and Farmhouse Cheeses, Who Makes Them, and Where to Find Them
Andrew Meyer, owner of Vermont Natural Coatings and Vermont Soy and founder of The Center for an Agricultural Economy
NOFA-VT (The Vermont Northeast Organic Farmers Association)
Vermont FEED (Food Education Every Day)
Shelburne Farms
Vermont Sustainable Exchange
The Grass-Fed Party: A New York City based website and blog
The Greenhorns: With Severine von Tscharner Fleming, director and visionary behind The Greenhorns, a documentary film that explores the lives of America’s young farming community—its spirit, practices, and needs.

Workshops & Fieldtrips

Draft Horse Cultivation
Traditional skills workshops: scything,
Cooking from Historic Roots
High Mowing Seeds

Summer 2008

The Place of Work in Rural Communities
The first Annual RHI was a four-day series of interdisciplinary academic, experiential, and instructional field-based workshops. Each of the four days of the event highlighted and strengthened connections between scholarship on rural communities in the Northeast broadly – and in the Northeast Kingdom specifically – and field experience within the working communities in the region.

Seminar Topics Included:

The Farmhouse: A Vision of Rural Heritage
The Politics of Rural Life through Journalism
Agrarianism in the North
Butterworks Farm: Diversified, Integrated, Signature Farming - Solutions for the Future?
Poetry and Place: The Agricultural Imagination
Three Kingdom Agrarians: Garret Keizer, Howard Frank Mosher, and James Hayford
Sense of Place and Work in Nineteenth-Century Vermont
The North Country Project: Oral History and Community Memory
Mapping Historical Landscapes
Looking for the Animal in the Animal-Embodiment of National/Regional Symbols
Working the Land: Conservation, Management, and the Rural Landscape

As part of the event, Sterling facilitated a number of field workshops in the surrounding rural, agricultural community as well as an on-site local foods banquet, and a local music interlude. Additionally, Sterling College hosted an open house for thirty local and regional rural heritage, land use, and agricultural organizations, which included local foods purveyors.