The ethnic landscape of rural Australia: Non-Anglo-Celtic immigrant communities and the built environment

Rural ethnic minorities occupy unique economic, social, as well as geographical places in Australian society. Non-Anglo-Celtic immigrants have transformed the rural landscapes through the construction of public and private spaces expressing their cultural heritage. These sites can also significantly impact the dynamics of social cohesion and inter-cultural relations in multicultural rural communities. The paper explores the potential role of the sites built by rural ethnic minorities in promoting both intra-group solidarity and inter-group dialogue. It also provides insights into complexities of multicultural place-making. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part briefly explores the literature on the migration and heritage, place, belonging and social cohesion, and the relationship between social capital and the built environment. The second part outlines empirical findings from Griffith, a regional town in New South Wales. The focus is on the places built by Italian immigrants, such as the Italian clubs and the recently built Italian Museum and Cultural Centre. The construction of these places facilitated a sense of solidarity among the Italian immigrants and expressed their belonging to place. However, the immigrant's attempts at place-making simultaneously involved inscribing a degree of exclusivity and a strategy of becoming more a part of their new environment. In doing this there is also potential for multicultural place-making to intensify the existing intra- and inter-group tensions.     

Segregation and protectionism: Institutionalised views of Aboriginal rurality

Rurality is a complex and contested term, with multiple notions and gazes amid calls for theoretical pluralism. In Australia, the spatial categories of ‘remote’, ‘rural’, ‘regional’ and ‘urban’ are applied to places that vary in their distance from an economic and political core and have differing population densities. We argue that natural resources institutions in rural Australia demand an ‘authentic’ performance of Aboriginality that is framed within orthodox and stable constructions of an Indigeneity associated with the remote category. Dominant representations of remote Aboriginal people living on traditional homelands and engaged in ‘traditional’ environmental protection are assumed to hold for all places and transposed when natural resources institutions satisfy compulsory Indigenous engagement. Such institutional requirements for authenticity exclude alternative and multiple Indigenous voices in natural resources management. Rather, Aboriginal people seek engagement across a portfolio of natural resources activities typically found in rural areas (such as mining, grazing, forestry, water allocation planning, and natural resources service delivery and enterprise development), and not just isolated in natural and cultural heritage conservation. This broad participation would more completely match their expressed aspirations and the multiple lived realities of their fluid and networked rural worlds. Using the rural town of Eidsvold in Australia as a case study, we discuss the findings of participant observation and semi-structured interviews with Indigenous people at regional natural resources management meetings and at ‘home’ in Eidsvold. Rather than a generic institutional approach, a place-based approach to understanding the complex ruralities of Aboriginal people is needed.     

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.     

医疗保险对农村居民家庭消费的影响分析--基于不同收入层级的跨地区比较

利用2009、2010农村固定观察点数据,分析了医疗保险对不同地区、不同收入层级的农村居民家庭医疗消费支出和非医疗消费支出的影响。实证结果表明：医疗保险对农村居民家庭的医疗类消费不存在显著影响,对非医疗类消费支出则存在显著的正向促进作用。分地区来看,医疗保险对东西部地区农村居民家庭医疗类消费的影响差异显著,对东中部地区农村居民家庭非医疗类消费支出的影响同样差异显著;分收入层级来看,医疗保险对家庭医疗类消费的影响在不同收入层级的农村居民家庭之间不存在显著差异,但对非医疗类消费支出的影响在不同收入层级之间差异显著。此外,商业医疗保险作为医疗保险体系的重要组成部分,对促进农村消费起到带动作用。最后,本文从加大政府补贴和完善保障机制两个方面提出政策建议以期有效降低农村居民家庭超常的预防性储蓄,促进农村居民家庭消费。     

Process evaluation of an environmental walking and healthy eating pilot in small rural worksites

Small Steps are Easier Together (SS) was a pilot environmental intervention in small rural worksites in Upstate New York in collaboration with Extension educators. Worksite leaders teamed with co-workers to select and implement environmental changes to increase walking steps over individual baseline and to choose healthy eating options over 10 weeks. Participants were 226 primarily white, women employees in 5 sites. A mixed methods process evaluation, conducted to identify determinants of intervention effectiveness and to explain differences in outcomes across worksites, included surveys, self-reports of walking and eating, interviews, focus groups, and an intervention log. The evaluation assessed reach, characteristics of recruited participants, dose delivered, dose received, and context and compared sites on walking and eating outcomes. Emergent elements of participant-reported dose received included: active leadership, visible environmental changes, critical mass of participants, public display of accomplishments, accountability to co-workers, and group decision making. Participants at sites with high reach and dose were significantly more likely than sites with low reach and dose to achieve intervention goals. Although this small pilot needs replication, these findings describe how these evaluation methods can be applied and analyzed in an environmental intervention and provide information on trends in the data.     

Being involved in the country: Productive ageing in different types of rural communities

Productive ageing recognises the contribution of older people to economic, social and cultural growth and helps build a sustainable community. Being involved in community life is good for individuals and good for society. However, we know very little about the participation of and contribution by people aged 50 and over in rural communities. This research aimed to develop a better understanding of productive ageing in different types of communities in rural Victoria, Australia. An anonymous self-complete postal questionnaire was distributed to a sample of households in twenty rural communities using the Australia Post Unaddressed Select Service. Those householders 50 years of age and older were invited to complete the survey. Data collected allowed examination of social and civic engagement, familiarity with community, the value placed on social relations by people aged 50 years and over, and how community involvement was linked to community sustainability. In particular it attempts to address the question ‘Does social and civic engagement differ across declining, stable and growing rural communities?’ Despite differences among rural communities, this study showed that older people develop and maintain strong community connections and well-functioning social capital and that participation in social activities was associated with feelings of being connected with community. It also identified health issues and lack of options as the main constraints on participation. A key message for policy makers is that older people play an important role in the sustainability of rural communities. There is much to be gained from actively supporting their participation in activities that are connected to ageing well.     

Understanding care for the poor in rural Russia

The issues surrounding care and care-provision have been key themes in social scientific research, yet the intersections between care and poverty, particularly in rural contexts, have not been sufficiently explored. This paper addresses this gap by studying care for the poor in rural Russia. It argues that isolated, disengaged and decontextualised caring interventions often ignore situated possibilities and traditions of care and overlook what matters to poor people. To overcome this problem, the paper uses 20 and 22 dwelling approach to prioritise a relational framework that focuses on care as concern, solicitude and possibilities for supportive action in the context of rural Russia. Using examples from fieldwork in two Russian villages, the paper stresses the constitutive role of non-representable practices of care which provide the ontological basis for recognising and understanding the worldviews and coping practices of the poor. It concludes with conceptual observations about alternative approaches to care, relations to others and responsibility for the rural poor.     

Rural ageing in the United States: Trends and contexts

This paper examines rural population ageing in the United States with a particular focus on the contrasting contexts in which older rural residents live. We compare the characteristics of the older population by rural versus urban residence, and explore challenges and opportunities associated with the ageing of rural baby boomers. The United States is a vast territory, and rural areas in the US are diverse regionally, in poverty and income, principal forms of employment, proximity to metropolitan areas, population size, density and composition, the history of change in these parameters, and a number of other factors that affect the ageing process. Hence, the diversity across rural areas is an important consideration in what affects the well being of rural elderly individuals, as well as the community-level impacts of rural ageing. Further, the characteristics of the older rural population help shape community and rural development outcomes for diverse rural communities. We use data from various US Census Bureau sources, and cite other studies to provide a demographic overview of ageing in the rural United States, and to analyze how this situation differs in varying socio-demographic and regional contexts. In the concluding section, we focus on policy implications associated with rural ageing.     

Grandchildren's perspectives on grandparents in rural New Zealand

Within studies of ageing, rurality and family relations, the prevalent “point of view” is based on the perspectives of adults, particularly older people themselves. However, taking seriously the reciprocal nature of kinship relations also challenges researchers to find ways to explore younger people's views and experiences of intergenerational ties. The study on which this paper is based addressed this challenge, by considering the dynamics of ageing in rural families through the lens of young people's experience. In the South Island of New Zealand, Area Schools serve families in rural regions specifically defined in terms of a catchment area based on distance from any other state school. This research study selected five (from 16) of these schools, and invited the classes of Year 7 and 8 students to take part in a classroom activity, led by the researcher with support from the class teacher. The activity involved a total of 98 young people (aged 11–13) in written completion of a survey which outlined their relationships and contacts with the people they know as grandparents, along with basic demographics of their own age, gender, family and household situation, and length of attendance at the school. From this survey, information was derived about 380 grandparents (of whom 73 were no longer alive), the nature and frequency of their contacts, and the types of activities they shared with these grandchildren. Around 40 percent of the students have daily or weekly contact with a grandparent, one third “regularly do things together”, and one fifth say they have “a special relationship” with a grandparent. By controlling the age group of the grandchild, and focussing on rural families, this study adds insights and detail to a growing body of research interest in understanding the roles and contributions made by grandparents to New Zealand families, in particular those in rural communities.     

Understanding the relationship between social change and its impacts: The experience of rural land use change in south-eastern Australia

This study investigated socio-economic impacts of land use change, giving explicit attention to the relationships between independently observed land use change and associated socio-economic changes, perceived land use change and socio-economic change, attributed cause of change, and experienced impacts of change. Using a case study region in south-east Australia, we examined the impacts of growth in use of land for dairy farming, cropping, blue gum plantations and rural residential development on (i) rural population trends, and (ii) the amount and nature of employment available in the study region. Perceptions and impacts of change were assessed using multiple qualitative and quantitative methods. Results demonstrate that local residents were not always aware of the extent and nature of land use change, and had difficulty attributing social changes and their impacts to the land use changes that underlie them. Furthermore, the felt impacts of land use change appeared dependent on a person's awareness of that change, and on their beliefs about the causes of social change. These findings highlight avenues for theoretical development to better specify the processes by which social change processes are experienced as human impacts. The findings also have implications for land use policy and social impact assessment, illustrating the importance of understanding both perceived and actual social change.