Launched in 2023, the UOC Rural Network seeks to facilitate and enhance co-creation and knowledge transfer to address the challenges and needs of current rural realities around the world. Our ultimate goal is to bridge the regional divide and redress the socioeconomic, gender and environmental inequalities that this entails.

As a network, we work together to develop wide-ranging, multidisciplinary, multidirectional collaborative approaches that involve the entire UOC community (teachers, researchers, students and graduates) and engage stakeholders in the rural world to facilitate processes that bring about positive change. Our strategy is all-encompassing, drawing on the dedication and commitment of our university and the entire UOC community, with a focus on research and networked and situated knowledge transfer.

The UOC Rural Network also focuses on promoting a coherent approach to rural proofing, which involves examining our teaching and research from a rural perspective. Thanks to its intersectional and multidisciplinary scientific framework of reference, the UOC Rural Network aspires to become a benchmark for identifying and developing research and knowledge transfer proposals. We are on a mission to catalyse opportunities, inspire innovative regional research and action, and shine a spotlight on the initiatives led by our own community. 

Goals

• Create shared, situated and useful knowledge to bridge the regional divide and reduce the socioeconomic and environmental inequalities that this entails from an intersectional perspective.
• Bring a cross-disciplinary and coherent rural perspective to the UOC.
• Encourage synergies and interdisciplinary collaboration between between the UOC Community and with territorial agents.
• Develop all-encompassing, multidisciplinary, participatory and open approaches.
• Develop a framework for supporting transformative and high-impact research proposals and projects.
• Promote action teaching to enrich our students’ learning processes and the social impact of our teaching.
• Strengthen the UOC’s ties with rural zones.

Strategy

TWe work as a wide-ranging network, with an intersectional and multidisciplinary scientific framework, involving the UOC community and local stakeholders. Our guiding principles are active listening, shared governance, collaboration and the desire to co-create situated knowledge in order to develop proposals and projects that have a transformative impact and enable the community to add value. 

We link up with institutions and organizations working to promote regional cohesion, mobilization and the development of rural areas across the country. We also network with other European universities, research centres and institutions.

We are engaged in research, education and knowledge transfer and dissemination, all from a rural perspective, because mobilizing talent and knowledge is key to building strong, connected, resilient and thriving communities.