Putting together ruralities: towards a symbolic analysis of rurality in the British mass media

In recent years rural geography has become increasingly sensitised to the significance of rurality as a cultural construct. This paper examines the production and reception of mediated representations of rurality: that is, it focuses on senses of the rural conveyed by mass media such as television. The paper discusses claims that images of rurality can be understood as socio-spatialisations. It then focuses on the rurality of British rural drama programmes, and particularly on three such drama series: Dangerfield, Heartbeat and Peak Practice. Drawing together a textual analysis of these programmes with research on their production and consumption, we explore the rurality produced through these television dramas, paying particular attention to the presence, and absence, of idyllic notions of the countryside. We suggest that while these programmes do enact idyllic constructions of rurality, their rurality is not simply reducible to this. We will also highlight how these programmes may also enact particular social identities, including, but not exclusively, those of class. We argue in particular that the three drama series can be read as conveying, in a range of ways, senses of middle-classness. The overall argument of this paper is hence that the mediated ruralities of British rural drama programmes are enactments of social and spatial imaginaries, the complexity and effect of which are often ignored in their textual reduction to a middle class idyll.     

Exploring rurality through `community': discourses,practices and spaces shaping Australian and New Zealand rural `communities'

`Community’ has a long history in both lay and academic discourses, but as contemporary rural societies are recognised to be both diverse and rapidly changing, one may ask whether `community’ is still relevant to notions of rurality. This paper extends both recent studies of rurality and discourse to consider how small and rapidly changing “communities” in Australia and New Zealand still subscribe to (and practice) forms of `community'. It proposes that a reworking of the concept of `community’ can embrace both the discursive and socially diverse nature of rural societies. In so doing the paper draws upon a framework for reading `communities’ published earlier in this Journal (Liepins, 2000a. Journal of Rural Studies, forth coming) and illustrates its application with case studies from Australia and New Zealand. Results show that `community’ is still an important notion for many rural dwellers and that it is constructed and maintained through a wide set of meanings, practices and spaces. Moreover, these analytical features are seen to be related in processes which maintain or challenge any case-specific notions of `community'; thus creating a sense of the term as a fluid and negotiated phenomenon.     

Discourses on rurality in post-socialist news media: The case of Lithuania's leading daily “Lietuvos Rytas” (1991–2004)

The Soviet regime defined rurality as a collective-farm or kolkhoz-based society. Since the late 1980s such a state-imposed definition of rurality was rapidly unraveling under the tensions and conflicts produced by perestroika and post-socialist reforms. In the new politics of the rural, the role that the news media was playing in shaping public opinion on rural matters was of growing importance. The paper analyzes 3827 articles on rural issues published during the post-independence period (1991–2004) in the leading Lithuanian daily “Lietuvos Rytas” (LR). Two types of discourses in rural coverage are discerned. During the 1990s rural coverage in LR was reflective of conflicts and tensions between relatively prosperous urban classes which benefited from post-socialist reforms and pauperized rural population. Rurality was increasingly associated with the failure of “the moral modernization” of the rural population. Rural population was stigmatized as deficient in values and character, remaining in the grips of the Soviet mentality and state dependency and, therefore, unable to take advantage of opportunities created by the reforms. Since the early 2000s when economic situation in the country improved significantly and Lithuania started negotiations on European Union membership, rurality in LR coverage was gradually re-defined in EU terms as a socio-spacial entity shaped by regional, national, and local policies promoting multifunctionality of rural areas, well-being of rural communities, and active citizenship. Factors that influenced changes in rural discourses are analyzed. Impacts of changing discourses on rural identities, rural politics and policies are discussed.     

Country backwater to virtual village? Rural studies and ‘the cultural turn’

In recent years, there has been something of a resurgence in rural studies, which has become somewhat more mainstream than previously in the academic space of social science. Increasing numbers of people have taken on important dualistic questions of society/space, nature/culture structure/agency and self/other from the perspective of rural studies. However, it is the ‘cultural turn’ in wider social science which has lent both respectability and excitement to the nexus with rurality, particularly with new foci on landscape, otherness and the spatiality of nature. With a conceptual fascination with difference, and a methodological fascination with ethnography, cultural studies have provided a significant palimpsestual overlay onto existing landscapes of knowledge. This paper seeks to convey some of the excitements and challenges which have been generated by this resurgence. Cultural studies of the rural have emphasized important new perspectives on real and hyperreal countrysides, but have also served to re-emphasize existing unresolved issues about politics, ethics and morality in rural research.     

Warrior Heroes and Little Green Men: Soldiers,Military Training,and the Construction of Rural Masculinities*

Abstract In this paper I examine military masculinities as a form of rural masculinity. I argue that one model of military masculinity, the warrior hero, acts as a dominant military construction of masculinity. I examine how the countryside as a location, and rurality as a social construction, impinge upon the construction of the ideal type of the warrior hero. The paper draws on recruitment literature, Ministry of Defence publicity materials, popular accounts of soldiering, and Army videos to trace out the practices and representations that construct the dominant discourse of the warrior hero. The paper is grounded conceptually in theories of gender identity and rurality as social constructions. I conclude by questioning the political consequences, both for rural life and for the armed forces, of this hegemonic model of masculinity.     

Gunning for rural England: The politics of the promotion of military land use in the Northumberland National Park

The UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD) on behalf of the armed forces owns substantial areas of land in the UK. Interest in the use and management of this land - the defence estate - has grown in the 1990s following changes in land use as a consequence of the restructuring of the armed forces. This paper examines the portrayal of military land use by the MoD, using a conceptual framework informed by theories of discourse and the social construction of rurality. Empirical evidence is drawn from a 1997 public inquiry into developments proposed by the MoD to the Otterburn Training Area in the Northumberland National Park. The paper examines how military training in a national park is constructed as a legitimate use of this space, with reference to discourses of conservation and environmental protection. The paper goes on to examine the ways in which the landscape of the training area is portrayed with reference to discourses about the appearance and consumption of the countryside. The paper concludes by looking at the effect of discourses of defence and national security in shaping the Otterburn debate, and in shaping the claims of the armed forces as defenders of the natural environment.     

Rurality discourses and the role of the social enterprise in regenerating rural Scotland

Social enterprises are businesses with primarily social objectives that reinvest their surplus in the community rather than seeking to maximise profit for shareholders. However, there is a debate regarding the drivers and the role of the social enterprise, the outcome of which is expected to have serious implications for the future of the institution [Brady, C., 2003. Social Enterprise development and the Role of the Social Economy in Scotland. CBS Network, Edinburgh]. A ‘reformist’ view supports the position that social enterprises are simple extensions of existing economic systems, whereas a ‘radical’ stance sees them as the embodiment of an alternative vision of running local economies. Development Trusts (DTs) are social enterprises that focus on community regeneration. Our research explored DT stakeholder views regarding the role of DTs in regenerating rural Scotland. Using Q methodology [Barry, J., Proops, J., 1999. Seeking sustainability discourses with Q methodology. Ecological Economics, 28, 337–345], we drew on ‘rurality’ discourses [Frouws, J., 1998. The contested redefinition of the countryside. An analysis of rural discourses in The Netherlands. Sociologia Ruralis 38(1), 54–68] expressed by DT stakeholders in order to investigate how these discourses informed their views. Radical positions were mostly associated with a hedonist rurality discourse and were split into three sub-discourses, whereas reformist positions mostly reflected a utilitarian rurality discourse. There was consensus between discourses in rejecting a primary DT contribution to rural regeneration by substituting state and local authority functions in rural Scotland. Results suggest that stakeholders prefer that DTs develop their own agendas and activity rather than try to substitute unsuccessful state or local authority provision of rural services. Social enterprise strategies and support policies promoting a service-providing role for DTs in rural Scotland should consider this issue if they are to avoid stakeholder objection and contribute to the success of DTs in becoming active vehicles of rural regeneration.     

A play for rurality – Modernization versus local autonomy

It is common to understand the governing of rural space as the outcome of a conflict between some romantic protectors of a lost past on the one hand, and the people who worry about creating economic values on the other. However, the power to shape the rural should not only be searched for in the open struggle between protectors and developers, but also should be analysed at the level of discourse, in the play between discourses about how to deal with the rural. In this paper I therefore present a modernist discourse and demonstrate how taken-for-granted truths about the rural – its history, its present and its future – are made possible by this discourse. Secondly, I will reveal how rurality takes on a different meaning in an alternative to the modernist discourse, emphasizing local and regional autonomy. In demonstrating that rurality is contingent upon a play between these two discourses, I want to provide some new insights into an important force behind the persistence of ideas about rurality in Norway.     

Trial by space for a ‘radical rural’: Introducing alternative localities,representations and lives

This paper is concerned with bringing together and drawing out some diverse strands of thought and action that are striving—from within a broadly green anti-capitalist agenda—to produce a rural space that is different from and a challenge to the mainstream trajectories that the production of the rural is taking in the global North. First, I outline the main elements of a new model for thinking about rural space in general that tries to incorporate three different facets of ‘space’ that have been teased out through geographical scholarship. This draws inspiration from work by Henri Lefebvre. After demonstrating this model in respect of the post-1945 productivist rural, I introduce it to debates about the emerging contours of the post-productivist countryside. Drawing predominantly on British examples, the second half of the paper develops one element within the heterogeneous potentiality of this post-productivism to consider some key aspects of what I term an example of ‘radical’ rural spatiality. This examines its perceived localities, conceived formal representations and partially lived everyday lives. The final main section gives brief consideration to opportunities now being presented to this radical rurality but also notes the considerable challenges that lie ahead.     

‘Playing’ doctors and nurses? Competing discourses of gender,power and identity in the British National Health Service

This paper adopts a feminist poststructuralist approach to demonstrate the ambiguities and complexities which exist in the relationship between work and subject. Recent studies in organizational sociology have argued that the discourses of work, and changing working cultures, have had a powerful effect on the production of subjectivities. New forms of working behaviour have been constructed as desirable, which often draw on personal qualities such as gender. This paper draws on research conducted with doctors and nurses in the British National Health Service to reveal the ambiguities which exist in the ways in which individuals position themselves in relation to these discourses. The discourses of work and organization are constantly mediated through, and destabilised by, the intertextuality that exists with competing discourses such as those of professionalism, gender, home and performance. Although organizational discourses are clearly powerful in the construction and performance of subjectivities, the interplay between discourses means that these are constantly destabilised and undermined.     

Children's understandings of rurality: exploring the interrelationship between experience and understanding

Prompted by current debates within rural studies, this paper explores children's understandings of rural New Zealand. Previous research has focused on children as “doers” rather than “thinkers”. This paper reverses this emphasis by exploring children's material and discursive experiences and the ways these are negotiated to develop their understandings of rurality. While it highlights common constructions of rurality based on experiences of agriculture, nature, and recreation, it also illustrates children's varied experiences and understandings of rurality from each other and from adults. This heterogeneity becomes apparent through the examination of individual children's biographies. These reinforce the importance of making room to consider children individually and with regard to their own personal context—that is, to enable the complication of academic/adult understandings of rurality.     

Hunting ruralities: nature,society and culture in ‘hunt countries’ of England and Wales

The practice of hunting with dogs in the British countryside has received a great deal of political attention over recent years. The election of the New Labour Government in 1997, with a manifesto commitment to allow a free parliamentary vote on hunting, has provided the campaign to abolish hunting with a great deal of momentum. However, a merger of the pro-hunt groups into the Countryside Alliance has created a powerful counter campaign, evidenced by the highly publicised countryside marches of the late 1990s. A key tactic of the Alliance's campaign has involved a key shift in the defence of hunting from the natural to the social realm, with the focus increasingly placed on the claimed socio-cultural contribution of hunting to rural communities. This paper assesses the merits of this claim by providing a critical in-depth exploration of the socio-cultural role of hunting with dogs in areas of the English and Welsh countryside. It does this in two main ways. Firstly, recent discussions of hunting are positioned within a broader social science context of nature–society relations, and consideration is given to the complex connections between hunting, nature and rurality. Secondly, connections between hunting, nature and rural society are examined in greater depth by drawing on key findings from a recent study of the social and cultural role of hunting in four areas of English and Welsh countryside.     

Where the wild things are: the evolving iconography of rural fauna

This paper explores the changing relationship between ‘nature’ and rurality through an examination of the shifting iconography of animals, and particularly ‘wild’ animals, in a rural setting. Drawing upon a set of examples, the paper argues that the faunistic icons of rural areas are evolving as alternative conceptions of the countryside, of nature and of the classic dichotomy between ‘wild’ and ‘domesticated’ animals are being re-constructed. The re-introduction of wild species, either through deliberate strategies or through natural migration, the diversification of husbandry to include rare and protected breeds and the increasing number of reported sightings of strange and unfamiliar animals all point to a change, or changes, in the place accorded to ‘wild’ things in countryside that have become, themselves, domesticated and gentrified.     

Rethinking the European countryside—can we learn from the South?

A new paradigm of multi-dimensional rural development has emerged which advocates a broader conception of the rurality where the rural is no longer the monopoly of the farmer. This new, broader paradigm needs to be reflected in the methodology of social scientific research, both generic and applied. In this paper we are primarily concerned with transfer of research methodologies utilised in development studies in the South to explore their usefulness for rethinking the European countryside. Such a transfer of methodology may be helpful, because integrated rural development can build on a long legacy in the South, while it has only recently been advocated in the EU context. The paper reflects upon the application of two such analytical concepts originating from development studies, which we have applied for research on the rural geographies in the European countryside, namely Sen's livelihood capabilities approach and Chambers’ concept of participatory rural appraisal (PRA). Having the sustainable livelihoods approach as overall framework, both methodologies are qualitative in nature and address people's survival strategies and livelihood practices with a focus on micro-level analysis at individual, household (Sen) and community level (PRA), while reflecting their embeddedness in wider social, political and economic structures. Our comparative studies suggest that the prospects for bottom-up development, as orchestrated by PRA or similar approaches, is constrained by structural factors, which define the boundaries for local development. The capabilities approach is useful to detect the capabilities to act and be within which bottom-up approaches may take their—though limited—role in rural development.     

On ‘problems and solutions’. The reproduction of problems for rural communities in Britain during the 1980s

Rural studies have long taken an interest in the problems besetting rural people, and in the ways in which these problems have been addressed by policy-makers. This paper briefly reviews the conventional analyses of problems and policy solutions in rural Britain during the 1980s and also raises the question of how rural researchers should regard the ‘problematic’ in these contexts. The move from regarding problems as the result of the structuring of opportunities to regarding them as a far more complex set of experiences and reactions to changing social, economic, political and cultural practices, raises interesting issues about the nature of power in rural lifestyles. It is argued that existing interpretative discourses of rural problems should be augmented by further study of problematic experiences relating to social constructions of belonging, feeling welcome, and cultural competence, and that the interconnected nature of power in politics, practice and discursive expectations about rural lifestyles will be an important subject for future research on these issues.     

Second home countryside. Representations of the rural in Finnish popular discourses

This paper focuses on the representation of post-productive countryside in Finland by exploring how the rural is presented in the context of second home tourism. Being an integral part of rural areas and their history, second homes are an established example of the post-productive consumption of countryside. The international and Finnish literature on rural images provides the theoretical framework for the paper. Research on rural visions has been active in recent years with an emphasis on the Anglocentric interpretations of the rural idyll. This paper contributes to this discussion by providing an empirical review of Finnish popular discourses of second homes. The review is based on an analysis of second-home owners' motives and media representations. The second home countryside is analysed as a farmscape, wildscape and activityscape. The results suggest that the Finnish second home landscape is seen as wilderness (1), life at second homes imitates visions of traditional rural life (2), and the environment is used for traditional consumptive and leisure activities (3).     

The elderly in rural environments

This paper provides a critical examination of the research available on the rural elderly in America. A detailed review of the many studies and topical areas investigated by rural gerontologists is not attempted. Rather, several ‘salient aspects’ of rurality (occupational, ecological and sociocultural) are identified as a basis for describing and explaining the status and experiences of older people in rural areas. The meaning of these dimensions as they relate to rural environments and the elderly is explored through both a general discussion and an application to two substantive issues — health status and life satisfaction. This examination illustrates the sizeable gaps that exist in what we currently know about the rural elderly and the problems/drawbacks of approaches traditionally used to study this topic. The paper concludes with a call for a more unified and conceptually based approach to future rural elderly research, that focuses on how and why the ‘salient aspects’ of rurality produce different circumstances and experiences for the elderly, and that emphasizes rural variation, not just ‘rural vs urban’ comparisons.     

Queer country: Rural lesbian and gay lives

Studies of rural life and lifestyles have yet to seriously address issues of sexuality. This paper outlines some of the experiences of lesbians and gay men who live in the countryside. It begins by tracing the history of the relationship between homosexuality and rurality in fiction and film, paying particular attention to the role of rural utopias in the lesbian and gay imagination. The paper then goes on to consider the structural difficulties experienced by those gay men and women who are born and raised in rural areas, and the lifestyles of those who choose to move to country locations in an attempt to create alternative communes. The paper ends with discussion of the ethics researching ‘rural others’.     

Experiencing and writing Indigeneity, rurality and gender: Australian reflections

This paper has two interrelated aims. The first is to contribute to knowledge about rurality, gender and Indigeneity. This is undertaken by the first author, Bebe Ramzan, an Indigenous woman living in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands. Bebe shows similarities across rural and remote areas in Australia and details her knowledge and experience of home, rurality, rural communities, land and gender. The second aim of the paper is to examine issues surrounding the involvement of academic white women in Indigenous research. Writing from the position of feminist white women Barbara Pini and Lia Bryant reflect on theories of whiteness as cultural practice and in this paper contest representations of rurality in rural studies as white.