Rural Space (rural + space)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


(RE)PRODUCING A "PERIPHERAL" REGION , NORTHERN SWEDEN IN THE NEWS

GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 4 2008
Madeleine Eriksson
ABSTRACT. Building on theories of internal orientalism, the objective of this study is to show how intra-national differences are reproduced through influential media representations. By abstracting news representations of Norrland, a large, sparsely populated region in the northernmost part of Sweden, new modes of "internal othering" within Western modernity are put on view. Real and imagined social and economical differences between the "rural North" and the "urban South" are explained in terms of "cultural differences" and "lifestyle" choices. The concept of Norrland is used as an abstract essentialized geographical category and becomes a metonym for a backward and traditional rural space in contrast to equally essentialized urban areas with favoured modern ideals. Specific traits of parts of the region become one with the entire region and the problems of the region become the problems of the people living in the region. I argue that the news representations play a part in the reproduction of a "space of exception", in that one region is constructed as a traditional and undeveloped space in contrast to an otherwise modern nation. A central argument of this study is that research on identity construction and representations of place is needed to come to grips with issues of uneven regional development within western nations. [source]


The Embedded Nature of Rural Legal Services: Sustaining Service Provision in Wales

JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 2 2007
Alex Franklin
There is a considerable amount of literature on embeddedness as part of sociological theory of economic action. Cultural and structural embeddedness often work together to shape the framework of economic relations, but, in an analysis of rural solicitors, we find unevenness between cultural and structural embeddedness. There are strong traits of the former, through a sense of place and belonging, but much less evidence of the latter with the structural relationships appearing relatively weak and underdeveloped. In a discussion supported by empirical data from a recent survey of rural legal practices in Wales, a number of causes are identified. The paper concludes that trends towards increasingly specialized rather than generalized legal service provision, set alongside the increasingly differentiated nature of rural space, suggest that the longer-term sustainability of rural legal practices may require both greater investment at the level of structural embeddedness alongside continuing reinvestment at the cultural level. [source]


At the Margins of Death: Ritual Space and the Politics of Location in an Indo-Himalayan Border Village

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 3 2001
Ravina Aggarwal
I base this article on an event that transpired during a funeral ceremony in the village of Achinathang in Ladakh, India. This incident, which coincided with a period of interreligious conflicts between Muslim and Buddhist communities, led me to question the manner in which margins become sites for the definition and contestation of citizenship and power. Here, I analyze the construction of margins in multiple contexts: in negotiating boundaries between death and rebirth, in coping with and challenging the control exerted by town-based political reform movements over rural space, and finally, in locating the position of the ethnographer in histories and spaces of domination. [death rituals, social space, politics of location, Buddhism, South Asia] [source]


Fluctuations in land values in a rural municipality in southern Québec, Canada

THE CANADIAN GEOGRAPHER/LE GEOGRAPHE CANADIEN, Issue 4 2006
ÉRIK PROVOST
The agro-forested region of the Haut-St-Laurent, in southwestern Québec, in Canada, has served as a laboratory for several years to a multi-disciplinary research team seeking to understand the interplay of stakeholders and processes influencing the rural space of southern Québec. Following directly in the footsteps of previous research, this study was undertaken to analyze the hitherto neglected but important aspect of fluctuations in land values with respect to geomorphology and land use, during the 1958,1997 period. A geo-referenced database was built within an object-oriented geographic information system (GIS) that includes data from the sale of parcels of land within the study area, land registry maps, land use maps, and a geomorphological map. These data were analyzed and sorted through queries addressed to the database. Finally, a statistical analysis was performed to analyze the relationship between sale price, geomorphology and indirectly land use, for the entire study period and for each of its decades. The results show that land value has increased at different times during the past, according to its geomorphological type and land use. These relationships are explained by the important transformation phases that have affected southern Québec during the second half of the twentieth century. La région agroforestière du Haut-St-Laurent, dans le sud-ouest du Québec, au Canada, sert de laboratoire depuis plusieurs années à une équipe de recherche multidisciplinaire afin de comprendre le jeu des acteurs et des processus affectant l'espace rural du Sud du Québec. S'inscrivant dans la lignée de ces travaux, cette étude a été entreprise afin d'analyser un aspect important mais négligé jusqu'à maintenant, celui de la fluctuation de la valeur des terres en relation avec la géomorphologie et l'utilisation du sol, durant la période 1958,1997. Une base de données géo-référencées a été créée dans un système d'information géographique (SIG) orienté-objet composée des données provenant des ventes associées aux parcelles composant la région d'étude, des cartes cadastrales, de cartes d'utilisation du sol et d'une carte géomorphologique. Ces données ont été analysées et triées par le biais de requêtes formulées à la base de données. Une analyse statistique multivariée a été réalisée pour analyser la relation entre le prix de vente, la géomorphologie et indirectement l'utilisation du sol pour l'ensemble de la période d'étude et pour chaque décennie. Les résultats montrent que les terres ont connu une hausse de leur valeur à différents moments dans le temps, selon leur type géomorphologique. Cette relation peut être expliquée par les phases importantes de transformation qui ont affecté le Sud du Québec durant la deuxième moitié du XXième siècle. [source]


Tensions between Scottish National Policies for onshore wind energy and local dissatisfaction , insights from regulation theory

ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY AND GOVERNANCE, Issue 5 2007
Karen Parkhill
Abstract Although best described as a ,meta' theory addressing the endurance of capitalism, regulation theory can successfully be used to explore not only the economic dimensions, but also the political, socio-cultural and environmental dimensions of particular developmental strategies. Thus, it offers a framework for embedding abstract debates about social attitudes to new technologies within debates about ,real regulation' , the economic, social and cultural relationships operating through particular places. This paper uses regulation theory and qualitative, interview-based data to analyse Scotland's drive for onshore wind energy. This approach teases out how responses to wind farms are bound up with wider debates about how rural spaces are, and should be, regulated; the tensions within and between national political objectives, local political objectives and local communities' dissatisfaction; and the connections between local actors and more formal dimensions of renewable energy policy. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [source]


Discipline and Devolution: Constructions of Poverty, Race, and Criminality in the Politics of Rural Prison Development

ANTIPODE, Issue 3 2009
Anne Bonds
Abstract:, The soaring expansion of the US prison population is transforming the geographies of both urban and rural landscapes. As the trend in mass incarceration persists, depressed rural spaces are increasingly associated with rising prison development and the increasing criminalization of rural communities of disadvantage. Drawing on in-depth archival and interview research in rural communities in the Northwestern states of Idaho and Montana, this paper explores how cultural productions of poverty and exclusion intersect with rural prison development. I examine how representations of poverty and criminality are entangled with processes of economic restructuring and the localization of economic development and social welfare. I explore the ways in which the rural prison geography of the Northwest is linked to the material and discursive construction of those in poverty and how these narratives are produced through local relations of race, ethnicity, and class. I suggest that the mobilization of these constructions legitimates rural prison expansion, increasingly punitive social and criminal justice policies, and the retrenchment of racialized and classed inequality. Further, I argue that these discursive imaginations of the poor work to obscure the central dynamics producing poverty under the neoliberal restructuring of rural economies and governance. [source]


"Sophisticated People Versus Rednecks": Economic Restructuring and Class Difference in America's West

ANTIPODE, Issue 1 2002
Lucy Jarosz
In this paper, we argue for the importance of constructing a human geography of white class difference. More particularly, we present a theoretical framework for understanding the cultural politics of class and whiteness in the context of rural restructuring. We theorize these politics through an examination of the national discourse of redneck that has emerged in the US. We analyze the term "redneck" as one of several rhetorical categories that refer to rural white poor people. We argue that while various terms are employed in geographically specific ways and cannot be used interchangeably, they nonetheless function similarly in positioning the white rural poor. Our examination of redneck discourse exemplifies these processes and points up the need for a broader analysis of representational strategies that reinforce class difference among whites. Drawing upon three case studies of white rural poverty, we deconstruct these imagined rural spaces by situating discourses about white rural poor people in the context of geographically specific political economies of power and social relations in Kentucky, Florida, and Washington. These case studies, as well as the national discourse of redneck, represent rural poverty as a lifestyle choice and as an individualized cultural trait. Abstract rural spaces are construed as poor, underdeveloped, and wild; rural, white poor people are represented as lazy, dirty, obsolescent, conservative, or alternative. A focus upon the political economy of community resource relationships and the construction and reproduction of redneck discourses reveals how exploitative material processes are justified by naming others and blaming the persistence of rural poverty upon the poor themselves. [source]


Modernism and the Machine Farmer

JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2000
Rod Bantjes
In this paper I apply recent theoretical discussions of the spatial character of modernity to a ,rural' context. I argue that neither modernity nor ,modernism' has been an exclusively ,urban' phenomenon in the twentieth century, and that attention to modernism in the countryside yields insights into the modernist project. From the beginning of the twentieth century, the apparently ,rural' spaces of the prairie west were already integrated into modern trans-local structures. Wheat farmers were ahead of their contemporaries in their appreciation of the nature and scale of modern distanciated relationships. They were ,modernist' in embracing and celebrating the technologies, particularly organizational technologies, for dominating space and time. They were also innovators in modern organizational design, seeking creatively to control the modern "machine" and to bridge the local and the ,global.' Their progressive experimentation culminated in a surprising proposal for ,co-operative farms' not unlike Soviet collective farms. [source]