Fatma Nil Döner, (PhD) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations, Istanbul Medeniyet University, Turkey. In her research, she intends to analyze rural transformation in Turkey with a multi-disciplinary perspective combining rural sociology, political science, and international political economy. Due to her interest in comparative studies and academic collaboration, she was affiliated to Oxford Department of International Development in 2011, Athens Agricultural University in 2016, and Wolfson College, Oxford University in 2019 as a visiting fellow. Within the broad scope of rural transformation, she is particularly interested in rural governance and policy making, livelihood strategies, and land control.Elisabete Figueiredo (PhD) is a Sociologist and Associate Professor with Habilitation at the Department of Social, Political and Territorial Sciences and full researcher at GOVCOPP – Research Unit on Governance, Competitiveness and Public Policies, University of Aveiro, Portugal. Her main research interests are on contrasting social representations of rural areas, traditional food products and rural development, rural tourism impacts and, more recently, on counterurbanization movements motivated by the economic and financial crisis. She is author and co-author of more than 200 publications in international and national journals, books and conference proceedings. She participated in several EU and nationally funded research projects. Currently she coordinates the research project STRINGS - Selling The Rural IN (urban) Gourmet Stores – establishing new liaisons between town and country through the sale and consumption of rural products.María Jesús Rivera (PhD) is a Sociologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Work at the University of the Basque Country, Spain. Her research revolves around the socio-demographic transformation of rural areas, the impact of new rural dwellers on these areas,and the potentiality of rural territories to attract and establish new populations. Within this broad research scope, her area of interest includes some related topics such as the relevance of labour migrants for rural sustainability, neo-ruralities, social inequalities, processes of counterurbanisation, rural welfare, expressions of poverty in rural areas, as well as the cultural dimension of rurality and nature, and their commodification. She has led and participated in several regionally and nationally funded projects on rural research.
