RSA Research Network on Peripheries and Peripherality (EdgeNet)

About EdgeNet

EdgeNet is the Regional Studies Association research network on peripheral places and regions (and why they matter). We advocate and amplify impactful research on, from, and for the diverse places and regions that are ‘non-core’ or on the ‘edge’ of core activities, including but not limited to: rural, peri-urban, post-industrial, de-populating, and remote areas.

EdgeNet seeks to understand peripheries as multi-dimensional and multi-scalar, in space and over time. Neither peripheries nor the many terms research and policy use to describe them (e.g., ‘marginal’, ‘remote’, ‘less-developed’) are homogenous. Not all peripheries are ‘left-behind’. Some core-periphery relationships are writ large in colonial histories and global economic flows. Some peripheral regions divide into cores and peripheries at local scales. Some cores have changed to peripheries (and some back again) over time.

We consider the ways in which edges are fluid and exist both spatially and ideationally. By exploring edges as interactions between societies and space, EdgeNet raises critical questions about marginality, stigma, displacement, and justice.

EdgeNet also encourages experimental methodologies and heterodox theoretical perspectives that might themselves be on the edge of Regional Studies – or take Regional Studies to the cutting edge of contemporary cross-disciplinary debates on spatial differences and divisions in the global economy.

Our aims

EdgeNet aims to:

Reinvigorate the study of peripheral places and regions, advancing conversations beyond limited views of ‘lagging regions’ and ‘left-behind places’.
Bring expertise across disciplines, methods, and theories together in an inclusive research community.
Facilitate opportunities for knowledge exchange, which engage with and learn from multiple regions in global contexts.
Grow the presence and profile of research on peripheries and its people within the RSA.
Engage policy and practice audiences to share evidence and experience.
Foster future edgy scholarship through opportunities for PhD and early career researchers.

How to get involved

EdgeNet reflects the growing community of researchers who are shaping critical conversations on peripheries and peripherality within – and beyond – Regional Studies. We welcome diverse expertise and edgy thinking that contributes to scholarship, informs policy and practice, and helps regions to thrive on their own terms.

To express your interest in EdgeNet and join our email discussion list, complete the form here: https://forms.office.com/e/7SwQ5bzpNP

To follow our work, look for #EdgyMatters. You’ll also find us at our ‘Edgy Matters’ special sessions at RSA conferences.

To join our discussion and announcement list sign up here: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/search.html?q=edgenet

Forthcoming Events

EdgeNet is the Regional Studies Association network for research on peripheral places and regions. We are an international and interdisciplinary research network focused on peripheral regions, and why they matter. EdgeNet aims to advocate and amplify impactful research on the diverse places that are ‘non-core’ or on the ‘edge’ of core activities, including but not limited to rural, peri-urban, post-industrial, de-populating, and remote areas. In collaboration with policy makers, practitioners and local communities, we aim to explore new ways of analysing our edgy spaces that can help us to understand where we are now, how we got here, and what we can do in the future.

We have a number of upcoming activities and warmly invite you to join our conversations. Two of our events are online, and our flagship edgy workshop is in person (in Umea, Northern Sweden). We will also be convening a special session at the RSA annual conference in Porto, Portugal, 6-8 May 2025. A call for conference papers can be found below.

Online policy series: Green Dreams in Peripheral Development.

From time immemorial, people have used peripheries to extract different types of resources. Some peripheries became valuable because of particular structural conditions, whereas others were rich in desirable and valuable ecologies and geologies. Green Dreams in Peripheral Development explores these issues, convening policy-makers, practitioners and academics. We seek to collectively ask questions about the lived experiences, migrations, planning and development challenges that arise when peripheries are used as a resource, and to co-produce principles and next steps for policy.

Green Dreams Policy Huddle

Weds 29 Jan, 1400 – 15.30 CET

The Policy Huddle is designed to enable networking and knowledge exchange between academics and policy practitioners with an interest in green infrastructure projects and their impacts on peripheral places. Invited speakers will give short talks and provocations about their work, needs, challenges and opportunities, and we will facilitate group discussions about how to collectively address these issues.

The outcomes of these conversations will set the agenda for our Green Dreams in Peripheral Development Webinar

This event will take place on Zoom. Click here to register.

Green Dreams in Peripheral Development Webinar

Weds 14 May 1400 – 15.30 CEST

Building on the policy huddle, this event asks what’s next for green development and peripheral places. Expert speakers will talk about their work and experiences, followed by a chaired discussion and audience Q&A.

This event will take place on Zoom. Click here to register

Edgy Matters Special Sessions

RSA annual conference, Porto, Portugal

6-8 May, 2025

CALL FOR PAPERS
This Edgy Matters special session is convened by EdgeNet, the RSA’s research network on peripheral places and regions. We aim to convene critical conversations among a growing community of researchers who are working to reinvigorate the study of peripherality within (and beyond) regional studies. For 2025, we ask whether reducing non-core regions to a ‘left behind’ condition minimises their (potential) role/s in collaborative responses to global challenges. To be marginal is to have limited agency at the edge of core spaces of political life – but also to forge identities, find empowerment, and articulate values. How might social, economic and geographic “margins” represent new fronts for transformative thinking and action?

We invite papers that engage with questions of peripherality, broadly conceived, and challenge the social, spatial, economic, environmental, and temporal inter-relationships that shape how peripheries are imagined, governed, lived and felt. We are especially interested in ‘edgy’ contributions that bring fresh methodological and conceptual insights, or introduce new areas and ideas to RSA audiences. Perspectives ‘from the margins’ and scholars who may themselves feel ‘on the edge’ of regional studies are also warmly welcomed.

Potential topics might include:
• ‘Edgy’ examples of social, cultural and political change in non-core areas
• Role of peripheral spaces and non-cores in broader national sustainability transitions, or in response to global challenges
• Theorisations of lived, felt and/or imagined peripheralism (e.g. rural, remote, post-industrial, topological, peripheries-within-cores).
• Reinterpreting the relationships between cores and peripheries.
• Peripheries as spaces of exploitation, extraction, collaboration, and innovation.
• Peripherality in territorial policy, place-based policy and sustainable developmental pathways.
• Local economic futures and territorial well-being in peripheral places.

Workshop and Field Discussions: Umeå, Sweden

25–27 June 2025

CALL FOR PAPERS

This year, we are going to Umeå for our Edgenet on Tour, 3 day workshop. The format that we follow is for one day full of papers/ paper ideas; and then the opportunity to discuss these ideas in depth out in the field. We will update our site with details soon, please see the details of our EdgeNet Cornwall event in 2023 here for an idea of what to expect.

Taking advantage of some fascinating examples of peripheral development being explored by our Umeå hosts, which open many complex questions, this year we will focus our summer workshop on questions around natural capital and green industrial revolutions, with an emphasis on Temporality, Hope, and Over/Under investment in peripheral areas. Papers should consider novel analyses of development questions, policy learning from other regions, and empirical and theoretical material which address solutions and approaches to economic, societal, and environmental challenges in peripheries. You might like to consider past and present examples of major investment opportunities that were grabbed or missed, or places which have been simply overlooked. We welcome empirical and theoretical contributions to the following indicative questions.

What happened, why, and what can (edgy) policy learn moving forward?
Are there any particular factors, or structures which have meant that resources have become (or failed to become) operationalised?
What are the long-term effects of over/under investment, and how do places go from being super-central, to peripheral?
And where do people figure in all of this? Do people who live in areas that experience heavy investment always benefit? If not, why not?

Call for papers: if you are interested in joining us in Umea, please submit your paper proposals by Feb 28^th 2025 to Joanie Willett J.M.A.Willett@Exeter.ac.uk

Let us know if you plan a full paper, or a 2000 word extended abstract (you can change this decision later, if required) and we will let you know of our final decision by 31^st Jan 2024.

Please note: We warmly welcome Early Career scholars, and are offering 2 x £500 bursaries available for travel and accommodation to help you to join us.

Past Events

Peripheries Research on the Edge Summer Workshop

25-26 June, Cornwall UK

The political rediscovery of so-called ‘left-behind places’ has raised research interest in peripheral places and regions. Yet headline narratives about peripheries continue to collapse the complex and multi-dimensional roles of the many places that are ‘non-core’, or on the ‘edge’ of core activities, including but not limited to rural, semi-rural, post-industrial, de-populating, remote and otherwise peripheralised or marginalised areas. This workshop aims to bring together interdisciplinary and international researchers with early- to mid-stage projects on peripheral and ‘edgy’ topics in preparation for a special issue on present and future directions in peripheral regions research.

We ask:
• What new ways of reckoning with peripherality are needed?
• Which empirical and conceptual perspectives can help understand the present, reflect on the past, and look ahead to the future?
• How might researchers go about ‘place-ing’ peripheries within regional studies, broadly defined?

Jointly hosted by EdgeNet, the Regional Studies Association, the Institute for Cornish Studies, and the Countryside and Community Research Institute, this workshop will spur critical conversations among a growing community of researchers who are working to reinvigorate the study of peripherality within (and beyond) regional studies. The workshop will bring together up to 20 scholars in a collegial, interdisciplinary environment to explore novel analyses of peripheries and peripherality. We invite ‘edgy’ work – creative, critical, cutting – that actively thinks through and with peripherality. We also welcome perspectives from the edge of (and outside) regional studies that bring alternative ways of looking at peripheral space and place.
Our collective work will focus on developing extended abstracts (up to 2,000 words) and/or papers-in-progress (up to 7,000 words) towards special issue publication focused on putting forward a research agenda on, and for, peripheral regions. Empirical and conceptual contributions are welcome. Researchers at all career stages are encouraged to attend, including PhD students and early career researchers.

Our programme in Cornwall
Cornwall is a great place for thinking about edgy questions. Once a core of the British industrial revolution and a global centre of mining expertise, Cornwall was a colonial communications hub that famously received international news ahead of London. Now, many in the UK consider Cornwall a byword for distance and of little value beyond a leisure destination. How do these processes happen and how are peripheries made and maintained? Do the ways in which we look at peripheral (re)development address fundamental problems, or paper over deep and difficult issues?

Day 1: 25th of June: Peer-to-peer paper workshop
A working programme in roundtable and small group formats. All participants will be expected to have submitted an extended abstract or working paper no later than 14 June (hard deadline), and to act as a discussant for 1-2 other submissions. We will open with a keynote discussion on themes in peripheral regions research and introduction to our host region of Cornwall, England. The day will proceed with breakout and full group discussions to review papers in a welcoming and supportive environment.

Day 2: 26th of June: EdgeNet on Tour (optional)
Cornwall is a pioneer of post-industrial tourist economies. Although many people from around the world know about Cornwall, the Cornwall people have come to know and love is a carefully curated performance of place and vastly different to many residents’ lived realities. Our alternative tour will explore ecological gentrification, visitor destinations that pretend to be communities, and of course, Cornwall’s famous coast. (We might even get to do some cold water swimming!). During the tour we will continue to discuss our research passions, and ideas, and give ourselves the time, space, and good spirits to let our ideas marinate and mature in a low-pressure setting.

Logistics
There is no fee to attend the workshop, however participants will need to cover their own travel and accommodation expenses. Lunch will be provided on Day 1 of the workshop, as well as tea and coffee and light snacks. Transport will be provided for the field trip on day two of the workshop. This is an in-person event and accommodations for remote or hybrid participation will not be provided. EdgeNet and the Regional Studies Association are offering two travel bursaries (reimbursable up to £400) for PhD students or early-career participants. Applicants must be current members of the RSA to be eligible. If you would like to be considered, please express interest in the linked application form.

For more information, please visit https://edgenet-rsa.weebly.com/