Interpreting Rurality: Multidisciplinary Approaches

The British countryside is a national institution; most people aspire to live there, many people use it for leisure and recreation and we can all watch rural life played out on our television screen, read about it in novels or consume its imagery in art and cinematography. The aim of this book is to explore the way that these aspirations and perceptions influence the way that the term "rural" is interpreted across different academic disciplines. Definitions of rural are not exact, leaving room for these interpretations to have a significant impact on the meanings conveyed in different areas of research and across different economic, social and spatial contexts. In this book contributors present research across a range of subjects allowing critical reflections upon their personal and disciplinary interpretations of "rural". This resulting volume is a collection of diverse chapters that gives an emergent sense of how the notion of "rural" changes and blurs as the disciplinary lens is adjusted. In drawing together these strands, it becomes clear that human relations with rural space morph materiality into highly complex representations wherein both disadvantage and social exclusion persist within a rurality that is also commodified, consumed and cherished.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction and official/statistical definitions Part 1 Material Rurality 2. Challenging Western perceptions: a case study of rural Zambia 3. Economic approaches to the rural 4. The potential for rural co-operatives in the UK 5. Rural parishes and community organisation Part 2 Represented Rurality 6. English historical perspectives on rurality: viewing the country from the city 7. Pits, pylons and posts: writing under the English rural idyll 8. A place for grazing livestock in defining rurality? 9. A case study in the literary construction of the rural idyll: the English Farm 10. Horncastle brass band: revising the banding myth from the edges of rurality Part 3 Contested Rurality 11. Dairy farming and the fight for ownership of the concept ‘rural’ 12. Contested attitudes towards wildlife in Britain 13. Changing social relations in the English countryside: the case of housing 14. Rural crime and policing 15. Gypsies and Travellers in modern rural England Part 4 Consumed Rurality 16. Capitalising on rurality: Tourism micro-businesses in rural tourism destinations 17. Ageing in rural communities: from ‘idyll’ to ‘exclusion’? 18. The rural public house: cultural icon or social hub? Part 5 Conclusions 19. Interrogating rural coherence

About the Author :
Gary Bosworth is a Reader in Enterprise and Rural Economies at the University of Lincoln. He has published widely on issues affecting the rural economy including counterurbanisation, structural and cyclical economic changes, home-working, neo-endogenous development approaches, and the growth of rural tourism. Peter Somerville is Professor of Social Policy and Head of the Policy Studies Research Centre at the University of Lincoln. He has published widely on housing, community (including rural community, community enterprise, and community policing), cooperatives, equalities, homelessness, participation and social theory.