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This congress of the european society of rural sociology will deal with the impact of the recent and current crisis on rural trajectories. The past months and years have led us to questioning the nature of what we consider normal and what we consider a crisis. The COVID crisis, the war and its consequences, the climate crisis, they are all changing the way we think about the world and act in it. How do these rapid changes affect rural areas, and the ways rural areas are imagined? Is the rural newly in crisis or should it be considered as having long – or perhaps always – been in crisis, in sometimes under-illuminated ways? Or can we still think of the rural as a place of stability? Which crises pervade the rural and where and when did these crises originate? With regard to the currently most pressing crises, which of the things that were taken for granted about the rural are now being questioned? And, conversely, which new challenges and new paths and futures for the rural have been opened?