Writing the Rural

This book arises out of an ESRC project devoted to an examination of the economic, social and cultural impacts of the 'service class' on rural areas. The research was an attempt to document these impacts through close empirical work in a set of three rural communities, but something happened on the way. The authors found that the 'rural' became a real sticking point. Respondents used it in different ways - as a bludgeon, as a badge, as a barometer - to signify many different things - security, identity, community, domesticity, gender, sexuality, ethnicity - nearly always by drawing on many different sources - the media, the landscape, friends and kin, animals. It became abundantly clear that the 'rural', whatever chameleon form it took, was a prime and deeply-felt determinant of the actions of many respondents. Yet it was also clear to the authors that they possessed no theoretical framework that could allow them to negotiate the 'rural' to deconstruct its diverse nature as a category. Rather, each of the extended essays in the book is an attempt by each author to draw out one aspect of the rural by drawing on different traditions in social and cultural theory. The essays are not just attempts to re-describe the changing rural scene; they are also attempts to understand changes as part of a wider cultural problem: the location of the 'rural' as the subject and object of new meanings, conventions and strategies of dissemination. As essays they are not exhaustive but they do begin to address these new kinds of rural geographies.