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This paper explores the redistribution and rescaling of societal risk in rural Britain during the COVID-19 pandemic, as one episode of the permacrisis. Drawing on empirical work in three contrasting areas of Scotland and England, we analyse individuals' experiences of risk and of the institutions which offer them support in times of crisis (markets, state, voluntary and community organisations, and family and friends). Our findings reveal the unequal distribution of societal risk during the pandemic, exacerbated by a legacy of precariatisation and individualisation in the labour market and welfare reforms. Although the state acted to mitigate risk and financial hardship during the lockdown, it was often voluntary and community organisations that filled the gaps left by the inability of the state to reach effectively into rural areas. Social infrastructure and institutional capital are therefore central to the mitigation of vulnerability and societal risk. This raises important questions about the capacity of institutions to provide support in times of crisis to rural citizens. Unless there is societal pooling of risk through such institutions to ensure social protection and that nobody is disadvantaged by where they live, future episodes of the permacrisis are likely to exacerbate inequalities and vulnerabilities in rural communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1960s–1970s in Ecuador, Indigenous and peasant movements challenged the descriptions of rural life in government education programmes while offering a space of transculture. As Sylvia Wynter [2003. 'Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument.' CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337.] proposes it, such space allows to narrate human life with sensibilities non-aligned with normalised cultural particularities of the ideal tacit 'we' in national(ised) stories. This text engages with the convivial movements between narratives and counternarratives about rural lives and ways of living. It argues that rural can be thought as a genre and ruralness as a practice of existence, which disrupt overdetermining notions of what counts as dignified life, valid political demands, and possible futures. That disruption is an exercise of conviviality where Indigenous and racialised peoples challenge a living together under rules and practices that demand their assimilation or erasure. Their luchas (fights) are proposals for coexistence through social change. Particularly the article looks at how the poem The Bread of Life, published in the bilingual Kichwa/Spanish newspaper Jatari Campesino, pushed back against the logics of 'bettering' lives offered by Fundamental Education and Community Development projects. These were projects espoused by the Ecuadorian Government and UNESCO and funded by the Alliance for Progress, among other foreign aid agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Recerca is the property of Universitat Jaume I and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores the trajectory of three rural, precarious Cambodian women as they deploy land as a means of undertaking survival work in Cambodia. Using a gendered lens vis‐à‐vis the concept of autonomy, this article rethinks distress sales of land and collateralized land for microfinance borrowing as forms of everyday autonomy. By highlighting women's central role in undertaking social reproductive labour to reproduce the rural household, these acts of distress land sale and debt‐taking are understood as forms of 'survival work', acts that ensure the day‐to‐day survival of the household and form the basis for broader projects of autonomy. Although we remain ambivalent about the long‐term prospects for resistance through credit‐taking in particular, we ultimately highlight the need for greater attention to variegated oppositional agency in the path to autonomy to understand the gendered labour of everyday survival in rural life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The lifestyle diseases which are becoming chronic noncommunicable disorders contribute to about 53% of death rate in India affecting the DALY to a greater extent. These lifestyle illnesses are proving to be a great challenge in public health as they are necessitating for the advanced modalities of screening techniques that have to be in place for early detection. The objectives of the study were to assess the prevalence and determinants of chronic illness and quality of life among rural residents of Pondicherry. Materials and Methods: The study is a descriptive observational study using a validated structured questionnaire among rural residents who have crossed the adolescent period. Results: The subjects included people aged above 18 years. It is observed that about 45.5% of the study population are between 38 and 58 years and about 24% of the study population were skilled, 10.6% are illiterate and 59.8% of the study population are not regular visitors to any health center, about 72% of them attend a health facility once in 3-5-7 months/year. It is observed that about 24.6% have had the disease for 6-10 years. Among them, 25.9% are diabetic, 7.3% are hypertensive, 8% have both, 3.7% had asthma, 0.3% are CAD, and 0.7% had a stroke. According to physical (median = 26), psychological (median = 21), social (median = 11), and environmental (median = 29) domains, quality of life was moderately good. Conclusion: This study revealed that all the domains are affected in the quality of life even in a rural area where urbanisation and industrialisation is not establihed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In India, the population of above 60 years was approximately 8.2% in 2011, which is expected to rise to 11.6% by 2026. Due to epidemiological transition of diseases, morbidity of chronic nature will increase with increase of elderly population and it will affect the elderly quality of life (QOL). Aim: This study made an attempt to capture health-related quality of life HRQOL and its correlates among elderly subjects in most backward district of India. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted in Nagina for a duration of 4 months and included 430 elderly (60 years or above) dwelling in the same place for more than 1 year as participants. The information on sociodemographic details, WHOQOL-BREF scale details and history of chronic diseases or disorders was collected by multipurpose health workers female using a pretested, predesigned, standardized questionnaire. An association between variables and poor quality of life was significant if the P value was less than 0.05. Results: Nearly half of study participants were living in joint families (45.3%) and 67.7% of elderly gave history of chronic morbidity. There were nearly half of participants (48.8%) with poor QoL in physical health domain. Multiple linear regression analysis revealed that older age, male, no schooling, without spouse, lower economic status and chronic disorder were independently associated with low QOL score. Conclusion: The study reported that nearly half of the elderly (46.7%) had poor health QoL. The family physicians shall provide preventive and promotive measures to reduce the chronic morbidity among elderly to improve QOL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hockey occupies a prominent role in the folklore of rural Canada. In this paper, I discuss the role of hockey events in expressions of place-based rural cultures. I draw from fieldwork conducted in three separate communities to discuss the semiotic processes involved in these events and their relationship to myths of rurality. Informed by mythologies and the carnivalesque, I unpack the way these events are engaged in the social processes of their communities. Firstly, I discuss how athleticism and social structures are subverted and reconceptualized. Secondly, I explore the freedom, profanation, and collective laughter of these events. Cumulatively, this analysis explores how normalized, performative transgressions of sport and social norms may be implicated in the construction of myths of rurality. While these events provide a glimpse into the resiliency and creativity of rural people, they may also distract us from thinking critically about the social political contexts shaping rural life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite longstanding ideas in sociology and related disciplines that hold rural life as being more communal and harmonious, little is known about the ways that social cohesion is defined or distributed in rural versus urban places. Stemming largely from scholarship on urban neighborhood inequality and concentrated disadvantage, as well as subsequent offshoots of collective efficacy theory, studies of place-based cohesion have been largely urban-centric. In this study we seek to examine whether cohesion varies significantly across rural and urban contexts and whether place-based poverty is related to cohesion similarly in each context. We expand beyond local studies to use data from the 2016 Missouri Crime Victimization Survey (N = 1873), which contains strong rural and urban samples, and is broadly representative of the state of Missouri—a state in which the population is approximately 30 percent rural—to examine these questions. Descriptive statistics show the social cohesion index, neighbors' willingness to help, and perceptions of them being close knit and trusted as being significantly higher in rural communities, but that perceptions that neighbors get along and share the same values did not significantly differ. Local poverty significantly predicted one item, trust, in rural communities and the cohesion index and all of its components in urban communities. After including controls, coefficients on poverty retained significance for trust in rural communities and for four of six outcomes in urban ones, but they did not differ significantly across groups in equality of coefficients tests. Poverty was most strongly and consistently associated with perceptions of trust in both locales. Results contribute to a more refined understanding of the ways that social cohesion is conceptualized in different places, and the extent to which poverty plays into residents' perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explore (1) what kind of everyday materials in rural villages attract Australian tourists to visit; (2) the nature of the dynamic tensions that occur during the interactions; and (3) how these create reflexivity with regard to the notion of home. Employing ethnographic interviews, participating in tour packages, and observing the interactions between Australian travelers and local people in rural villages of Java and Bali, the project attempts to reveal the interactional experiences that occur in the everyday life of rural village settings. Results indicate, first, that the Australians identified home, street, natural surroundings, and people as the everyday materials for them to see how others live their life. Second, the perceptions of pressure to buy appear during the dynamic process of interactions. Third, the visit to the rural villages of Indonesia become a comparative journey to enjoy the privilege of "home," while the Australians are being "away." As a conclusion, theoretical and practical understanding contribute to capture the specific market of Australians and how this market interacts with a specific space in Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: There is a robust consensus, most recently articulated in the 2020 Lancet Commission, that the roots of dementia can be traced to early life, and that the path to prevention may start there as well. Indeed, a growing body of research demonstrates that early life disadvantage may influence the risk for later life dementia and cognitive decline. A still understudied risk, however, is early life rural residence, a plausible pathway given related economic and educational disadvantages, as well as associations between later life rural living and lower levels of cognitive functioning.Objective: We aim to examine whether living in rural environments during early life has long term implications for cognitive health in later life.Methods: We employed the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which tracked 1 in every 3 high school graduates from the class of 1957, from infancy to ∼age 72. The data include a rich array of prospectively collected early life data, unique among existing studies, as well as later life measures of cognitive functioning.Results: We found a robust relationship between early life rural residence, especially living on a farm, and long-term risk for reduced cognitive performance on recall and fluency tasks. Controls for adolescent cognitive functioning, APOEɛ2 and APOEɛ4, as well as childhood and adult factors, ranging from early life socioeconomic conditions to later life health and rural and farm residency, did not alter the findings.Conclusion: Rural living in early life is an independent risk for lower levels of cognitive functioning in later life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within Australian geographies of sexualities, most work centres the urban areas of Sydney, New South Wales, while less is known about queer life in regional and rural Australia. In contrast, this article explores how lesbian, bisexual and queer young women understand and experience identity and place in Tasmania. Using a queer futurities theoretical framework and a qualitative feminist methodology, in this article I examine how narratives of place shape queer Tasmanians' understandings of identity, belonging, and home. Participant narratives of leaving, arriving, and returning to Tasmania reflect dominant rural youth migration patterns, while also providing new insights into how queer young people position Tasmanian space, identities and futures in broader Australian culture. This article draws on recent work in geographies of sexuality to show how Tasmania produces unique sexual identity cultures that influence queer young women's sense of time and place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Second World War, the communists used all organs of authority to indoctrinate and incapacitate society in the Soviet Union-dependent socialist countries. Sport also became a tool of the government's propaganda policy. The communists established an organization in the countryside called Peasants' Sports Teams, which served as a bridgehead of the ruling party in the collectivization of agriculture. Such actions, consistently implemented during the Stalinist era, were resisted by older residents. They opposed the changes in rural customs, especially the sports activity of girls, treating them as indecent behaviours. Apart from the negative effects on society, the government's policy also had positive ones, such as meeting the vital interests of young people, the need for competition and entertainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many rural areas throughout the Great Plains, including Kansas, have been affected by "brain drain" or the out-migration of well-educated people. In response to this negative outlook, in 2012, Kansas implemented the Rural Opportunity Zone (ROZ) Program to encourage college-educated adults to move to the state's rural counties. This brief aims to identify what influences individuals to participate in the program and what types of individuals are likely to participate. This study employed a survey of Kansas State University students and interviews with local officials who manage the program. Survey results reveal that most students do not view themselves as likely to participate in the program despite its financial incentives. Students likely to participate come from ROZ counties, are likely to find employment in rural areas, and hold positive views of rural life. Interviews with county officials revealed that the program primarily benefits individuals who had already intended to live in a rural area, and that the program rarely attracts newcomers. The program is poorly funded in many counties, and a lack of high-paying jobs limits growth in a way that the ROZ cannot outweigh. This brief also highlights the need for changes concerning the program's benefits and awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political mobilizations in small towns have come to play a disproportionate role in today's national politics. This article examines the conditions giving rise to small‐town mobilizations through an in‐depth case study of Tonganoxie, Kansas. Residents of this town mounted a massive campaign to block the opening of a Tyson chicken processing plant in 2017. The article draws on interviews, observations, a newspaper claims database, and extractions from the "No Tyson in Tongie" Facebook group page. The article maintains that a racialized cultural framework ("rural idyll") among White middle‐class residents helped them perceive the plant as an existential threat. Social networks, sustained through social media, enabled the same residents to mobilize in a fast and forceful manner. We suggest that in "hybrid" towns (partially rural and suburban), the "rural idyll" is politically decisive. It unites recently settled and established residents in battles to defend a particularly racialized and classed way of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial justice includes the right of residents to define their own space of habitation, the places in which their everyday lives unfold. Recent scholarship has shown how this right has come under pressure in the countryside, prompting a need for research that attends in-depth do the ways in which rural dwellers exercise this aspect of spatial justice. The paper addresses this need by studying the affective relations in everyday rural life between human residents, wild and domestic animals, landscapes, and 'baroque' natures. Utilising photoethnographic fieldwork in the Danish countryside, the paper shows how animals, natures, and landscapes come to play distinctive parts in the (re)production and breaking up of the vernacular rhythms that form the stable but fluctuating and uncertain backbone of everyday life in the countryside. The practices expressed through these rhythms represent important local ways of knowing the rural as a space of habitation, but their vague, diffuse, and ephemeral nature make them difficult to translate into policy and planning. The genuine attempt to do so, however, remains indispensable to the pursuit of spatial justice, because it may be the only way to ensure that such efforts do not become counterproductive by unwittingly reproducing hegemonic ideas about what certain places are and ought to be. On the part of researchers, this requires an insistence on the necessary contingency of rurality, while on the part of planners and policy-makers it requires awareness of the necessarily imperfect, partial, and crude nature of available knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Adjustment to the onset of disability has complex reverberations relating to both socially engendered disadvantage and the realities of functional limitation. Pre-existing ways of understanding disability can meaningfully shape this experience. Objective: This study aimed to provide an exploratory understanding of the experience of becoming disabled in a low-income, under-served, rural South African community. In particular, it was interested in how people with disabilities constructed their struggle within the conceptual split between disadvantage caused by 'malfunctioning' bodies (a 'medical model' view) and that caused by social organisation (a 'social model' view). Methods: Seven people between the ages of 39 and 47 who had acquired a physical disability within the last 4 years were recruited in a rural area of Limpopo province, South Africa. Semi-structured face-to-face interviews were conducted, and the resulting data were thematically analysed. The authors were positioned as both 'insiders' and 'outsiders' to the participants and sought to use this orientation to best understand and stay faithful to participants' views while simultaneously applying participant's experiences to conceptual knowledge in disability studies. Results: Four themes emerged: (1) emotional impact of onset of disability, (2) being introduced to disablist prejudice, (3) being required to take on a 'disabled' identity and (4) socio-economic implications of becoming disabled. The findings reflected a complex set of adverse experiences in the lives of the participants, spanning disadvantages based on embodied, cultural, relational and environmental factors, which were superimposed on existing, generalised poverty in their local communities. Participants made sense of their predicament in multiple, evolving ways. Conclusion: This study contributes to the understanding of the complex predicaments, and sense-making, of persons who have acquired a disability in a rural, impoverished Global South environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late socialist countries are transforming faster than ever. Across China, Laos and Vietnam, where market economies coexist with socialist political rhetoric and the Communist party state's rule, sweeping processes of change open up new vistas of imaginaries of the future alongside uncertainty and anxiety. These countries are three of very few living examples that combine capitalist economics with party state politics. Consequently, societal transformations in these contexts are subject to pressures and agendas not found elsewhere, and yet they are no less subject to global forces than elsewhere. As all three countries maintain substantial rural populations, and because those rural areas are themselves places of change, how rural people across these changing contexts undertake future making is a timely and significant question. The contributions in the issue address this question by engaging with lived experiences and government agendas across Laos, China and Vietnam, showing a politics of development in which desire and hope are entangled with the contradictions and struggles of late socialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding food security in a localized context is often overlooked when diagnosing and developing food security interventions. The aim of this exploratory study was to establish how young adults defined food security. For this study, a purposive sampling strategy was utilised to select 49 young adults, aged 21 to 40 years of age, from two rural communities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Data on how participants defined and interpreted food security and food insecurity along with related issues, were collected through focus group discussions. The thematic content analysis generated a pattern of categories, concepts and themes. The themes were compared to the Food Agriculture Organization's (FAO) comprehensive definition and framework for Food Security. Interpretations were based on observable descriptions, experiences and lived realities. Child health and care practices were equally important for defining food security, strengths that future policies and programmes could build on. Social ills and mental problems contributed to observable psycho-social aspects of severe food insecurity. Coping strategies included agriculture, social networks, and natural food resources to enhance food security. Lack of irrigation support services, underutilization of indigenous food resources, and normative experiences on transitory food insecurity posed barriers to achieving food security. This exploratory study provides insight into beneficial practices that programs can build on. Given the centrality of traditional food practices to cultural health, policies must consider both market and traditional food systems when conceptualizing food security in multicultural South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: We explored how lifetime comorbidities and treatment-related cancer symptoms were associated with quality of life (QOL) in rural cancer survivors.Methods: Survivors (n = 125) who were rural Illinois residents aged 18+ years old were recruited from January 2017 to September 2018. We conducted 4 multivariable regressions with QOL domains as outcomes (social well-being, functional well-being, mental health-MHQOL, physical health-PHQOL); the number of physical and psychological comorbidities (e.g., arthritis, high blood pressure, stroke) and treatment-related cancer symptoms (e.g., worrying, feeling sad, lack of appetite, lack of energy) as predictors; and, cancer-related and demographic factors related to these variables as covariates.Results: The number of comorbidities and number of treatment-related symptoms were inversely associated with functional well-being (Std β = - 0.36, p < 0.0001 and - 0.18, p = 0.03), and MHQOL (Std β = - 0.30, p = 0.001 and Std β = - 0.25, p = 0.004). Comorbidities were associated inversely with social well-being (Std β = - 0.27, p = .003). Comorbidities and treatment-related symptoms were not associated with PHQOL (p = 0.20-0.24). Sensitivity analyses suggested that psychological comorbidities, treatment-related psychological symptoms, and physical comorbidities were associated with social well-being, functional well-being, and MHQOL.Conclusions: Our study highlights the utility of risk-based survivorship care plans to address the negative, additive impact of comorbidities and the treatment-related symptoms to improve the health-related QOL among rural survivors. Future research should assess how contextual factors (e.g., geographic distance to oncologists and other providers) should be incorporated in survivorship care planning and implementation for rural survivors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contribution of rural areas to the advent of globalization has been poorly explored from a historical perspective. In this paper, I explore how rural areas were involved in the shaping of colonialism and industrialization and contributed to globalization. The case study examined deviates from the pattern of self-sufficiency and situates the rural world at the epicentre of key historical processes of the recent past. This paper is primarily based on a farmhouse that played a significant role in these processes, despite its apparent isolation in the hills of the Basque Country, as it produced cider for ships involved in the colonial race and supplied nuts and iron ore for the British Industrial Revolution. With this case study, I hope to provide an example of a rural site that contributed to change in the wider world, while it was also being transformed itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role do villages play in 'an urban civilisation'? Although it is likely that most of the populations of South Asia's ancient Indus Civilisation would not have lived in cities, it is not clear what their rural way of life would have encompassed. Using ceramic assemblages excavated from Indus-period villages in northwest India, alongside ethnographic records on village organization and rural craft production, this paper argues that Indus villages were characterized by rural complexity. This comprised a range of activities, including craft production, as well as short- and long-distance socio-economic links. Drawing on historical narratives, we show how South Asian villages have been essentialized and presented as either ideal or conservative extremes. We argue for the importance of a better understanding of the breadth and nuances of the rural sphere, and for a greater research focus on village life in the Indus context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After an initial reflection on just what might be meant by 'rural experience', the essay turns to an explicit comparison of the author's childhood experiences on his maternal grandparents' farm in Afton, Virginia, with Thomas Hardy's rendition in his novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, of his childhood experiences in Upper Bockhampton, Dorsetshire. Both Miller and Hardy seem to represent their childhood places as examples of genuine 'organic communities', but the essay shows in detail ways in which the model of organic community does not quite work in either case. This 'non-working', however, is not the same in each instance. The essay shows this in detail, especially by way of attention to the southern heritage of slavery in modern Afton, and by way of the narrator's ironic detachment in Under the Greenwood Tree as well as through the photographs that illustrated early editions of Hardy's novel and through the reference in the subtitle to the novel as 'A Rural Painting of the Dutch School'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this longitudinal and qualitative study of rural life in western Turkey, I argue that ecological conditions, state policies, and villagers’ agency play a significant role in the suburbanization of villages. This paper traces the history of how villagers in the Yuntdağ north of Manisa, an arid and rocky region, used nomadic heritage and Islamic culture as economic resources. I argue that villagers have gone from being cultural heritage entrepreneurs to wage laborers, incorporating and identifying with the ethno-national identity of the nation while adjusting their lives to the state. In so doing and with the bureaucratic redefinition of the villages in the region as urban neighborhoods, the meaning and definition of rural life gradually is erased. Based on over fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork, 2000–2015, this paper considers the suburbanization of rural life and the highly gendered economic decisions villagers make. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine what people’s reasons for migrating from, and subsequently returning to, a rural community can tell us about the inter-related ways that rural and urban spaces are conceptualised. Drawing on research in a small, agricultural community in Paraguay, I explore two illustrations of women who are circular migrants, in order to demonstrate some of the potential circumstances, aspirations, and experiences that can shape decisions to migrate for work and then eventually return to rural spaces. My discussion demonstrates the importance of migration in the construction of a rural present and future, in which movements between rural and urban spaces help to support rural life and aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing body of research interrogating the discursive construction of ‘rural’ in negative terms – as lacking, in decline or in crisis. This paper contributes to this body of literature by taking as its point of departure skilled trades training in Canada’s most easterly province, Newfoundland and Labrador. To meet the labour demand associated with industrial projects in rural and remote areas, the provincial government has invested in strategies to encourage youth to enrol in certified training programmes in the skilled trades. This paper examines the contradictory and incomplete ways in which individualized labour market subjects are produced through a combination of economic restructuring and government policy initiatives related to training and apprenticeships, and considers what this means for how young people think about and experience the rural. I argue that rural places are largely framed in economic terms, either as in decline and crisis or as industrial sites of resource extraction, and that by discursively linking youth outmigration and skilled labour shortages, the sustainability of rural places and the province is individualized and downloaded onto youth, ignoring the structured inequalities that mediate access to training and employment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Guided by the Social Representation Theory, this study aims at investigating rural social representations among farmers in State of Espírito Santo - Brazil by analyzing the semantic feld associated to the representational object "rural person"; the organizational principles of individual attitude in face of shared content; and the anchoring processes. Two hundred (200) residents, aged between 7 and 81, belonging to four generations of a rural community participated in individual interviews in this study. The results analyzed using software SPAD-T showed that rural sociability is represented from the positive association to the agricultural and community spheres, as well as from the negative comparison between country and city life, which causes feeling of depreciation and critical evaluation about the poor investments in rural areas. It also identified that personal and community values strengthen the positive image of rural identity, showing strategies to maintain the country way of life among different generations in this community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the operation of neoliberal logic in The Fabulous Beekman Boys, a reality television show that premiered on the now rebranded Planet Green network during the summer of 2010. The essay's analysis focuses primarily on the way the protagonists' homosexuality is figured proleptically as something like an explanation for both their atypical successes as small-scale farmers and their inevitable failures. It also draws attention to way the show mobilizes stereotypes about gay men's inherent tastefulness, and their penchant for taste-making, as a moralizing homily regarding the virtue of personal sacrifice, the nobility of risk-taking and the economically redemptive potential of niche marketing under conditions of late capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Recherches Sociologiques et Anthropologiques is the property of Centre Recherches Sociologique and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the experience of the ‘school journey’, an educational fieldtrip of a fortnight’s duration, as practised in London’s interwar elementary schools. Established historical debates over perceptions of the countryside in interwar Britain have previously failed to discuss the messages promoted in schools. This article demonstrates that an idyllic notion of the rural countryside often influenced school practice, but that there was little attempt to link this explicitly to a wider ideological message around national identity or patriotism. Although exposure to the countryside was seen as undoubtedly beneficial, school journeys were not uncritical of rural life. They also encompassed a much wider range of purposes, being an opportunity to study different industries and local heritage, or foster contact with local people. Furthermore, they provided an unequalled opportunity for increased supervision by teachers, and thus a valuable chance to counter the perceived moral ill-effects of a child’s usual working-class environment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most research involving lesbians has been conducted using urban or suburban samples. However, the challenges lesbians face in their rural communities differ from those encountered by lesbians in urban areas. Lesbians in rural areas face potential isolation due to the lack of a visible gay community, an overall lack of services and resources, and an often heightened experience of stigma. Rural areas tend to have a more conservative political climate with an emphasis on fundamentalist religious beliefs. Due to such strong heteronormist pressures, lesbians who decide to come out to their rural communities often face justifiable fears surrounding possible discrimination from employers, religious organizations, schools, and even their friends and family members. Therapists who work with lesbians in rural areas should be prepared to help their clients face and successfully deal with many unique challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Innovacion Educativa is the property of Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Servicio de Publicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study examined the relations between community type, race, and the types of neighboring behaviors in which residents engage, with a random sample of 1,367 participants from urban, suburban, and rural areas of a southeastern state. Analyses controlled for several variables that are believed to influence neighboring. The multivariate analyses indicated a main effect for the type of community. However, the effect was contingent on the type of neighboring and disappeared once the covariates were included in the model. Similarly, main effects of race were found with African Americans engaging in more surveillance and Caucasians engaging in more social neighboring. The implications of these findings framing additional research on race and community type are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how changes in the labor market affect family life and sex roles in rural communities of the U.S. that are constructed around a specific industry. The loss of rural jobs in the forestry industry based in the Golden Valley community of Northern California due to environmental regulations and deindustrialization is noted. The author suggests that flexible gender roles are more conducive to a stable home environment due to the potential inability of men to serve as the sole means of financial support for a household following labor changes and job losses. The ability of men to have different conceptions of masculinity in regard to parenting is discussed.

This paper examines the social meanings of rural life and how these meanings shape farm women's perspectives and experiences of family leisure. Based on qualitative interviews with a purposively selected group of farm women in Canada, the findings call attention to the values related to the social and physical context of family leisure activities on the farm and the integration of work, family and leisure. The role of leisure as a medium to remain connected to their rural heritage while preparing children for a nonfarming way of life was also significant. Emphasis is placed on the contradictory nature of family leisure and how family leisure is a window into the broader social, political and economic changes affecting rural farm life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a day in the life of the Walnut Lake Curling Club. The reflexive analytic story is crafted from ethnographic research undertaken in 18 curling clubs across rural Canada. Contrary to a growing tendency toward individualized and privatized leisure, curling clubs in rural Canada remain sites for shared leisure. Building on recent efforts to position leisure sites as third places, the paper enhances an understanding of curling clubs' construction, dynamism and fluidity. Ethnographic approaches are offered as presenting opportunities to comprehend how third places are constructed, particularly within the changing context of leisure in rural life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the key demographic, employment, income, and social capital features of rural Canada. Rural populations have different characteristics that are typically a direct result of “rurality”—i.e., long distances and low population density. Jobs that require a high-density population (such as a professional hockey player) are not available to individuals who live at a distance from a metro center. Rural Canada may have an agricultural landscape (or a forestry or mining landscape) but the vast majority of rural workers do not work in primary sectors. Manufacturing employment is larger. Rural Canada is competitive in manufacturing—rural areas are gaining a larger share of Canada's manufacturing workforce. Rural incomes are lower, on average. But lower living costs mean that the rural incidence of low incomes is similar to urban. In rural communities, the existence of social networks does not always imply that these networks are used. Networks are complementary—one network does not always substitute for another. However, local strength in one network can be used to build capacity in another network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In the UK, although food choice in urban contexts has been widely studied, far less empirical information has been gathered from rural settings. With the closure of local services, some rural dwellers were believed to experience difficulties in meeting healthy eating recommendations. The present study aimed to explore perceptions of village store users. Methods: Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted individually with 40 adults who were frequent users of rural village shops in Norfolk, UK. Participants were purposively selected to ensure that a wide demographic cross-section of customers was obtained. Interviews focused upon food choice strategies; attitudes towards rural food retail; and the provision of healthy foods. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed qualitatively, using an established interpretative phenomenological approach. Results: Four main themes emerged as drivers of food choice in rural villages: (1) village store as icon, which described how the perceived centrality of village shops influenced food choices; (2) village store as a service provider, which described top-up shopping behaviours; (3) alternative food sources, which described store users desires for local foods and their attitudinal conflicts towards supermarkets; and (4) lifestyle factors, which described the influence of factors such as time pressures, access to cars and family structures. Conclusions: Food choices were strongly influenced by the distinctive characteristics of the rural environment. Village shops were seen as important for community identity (‘rural idyll’), as well as providing access to food and services. However, desires were made apparent for a greater range of healthy, fresh and locally-sourced foods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses topics related to the healthcare implications of living the simple life to the residents of the rural areas in Texas. It explains that occupants in rural areas are less healthy comparing to the people in the urban area because of their lifestyle in residing in a sparsely populated area. It describes the rural definitions developed and used by government agencies, researchers, and policy makers.

In this paper I demonstrate the ways in which young people imagine, define and create discourses of the countryside, in particular how they envision both the place of the countryside and their place in the countryside. I focus on how rural youth situate themselves within discourses of the rural and in so doing, I challenge previous constructions of the relationship between young people, the rural idyll and cultural marginality. Specifically, I assess the role and importance of place-myths and practices in the formation of identity. In particular, this paper offers a more developed account than previously conceived of how rural youth identity is formulated in and between complex social and material relations predicated on difference. My analysis takes account of the ways in which young people actively produce culture and experience and understand belonging and not-belonging, their different views of rurality, their production of an 'intensive-self' and the extent to which the countryside is, on one hand, enabling and nurturing (inclusive), and on the other, restrictive and prohibitive. This paper makes an important contribution to the geography of youth by presenting a framework for understanding young people in the countryside that is predicated on exposing conflicting and sometimes contradictory feelings of inclusion and exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of the specific features of rural racism and rural/race issues is a developing field of study. Much of the debate and existing research focuses on demonstrating the "specificity" of rural/race issues and responding to the "rural ethnic subject" as the victim of racial exclusion and/or violence. Drawing on a study conducted in the north of Wales and work on Welsh narratives on race, this article seeks to revisit the rural/race debate and argues for its repositioning within wider discourses of British multiculturalism. It explores the conceptual basis of the rural racism debates, in particular seeking to qualify the notion of the "specificity" of rural/race matters within the context of the newly devolved nations and particular constructions of "the ethnic subject" in rural/race relations. It suggests ways in which the "rural" discourse on race decentres the dominant narratives of multicultural Britain and is contributing to its reformulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural living poses special challenges (and opportunities) for the significant health information intermediary role that women enact. The authors describe interviews with 40 women living in a rural, medically underserved county in southwestern Ontario, Canada, who discussed their information-seeking experiences and the strategies used to find information about a chronic health concern or an acute medical problem. The women's stories reveal that they define health very broadly and that their information seeking is influenced by contextual factors, such as rural living and gender roles, that interplay with their self-reliance, health literacy, and the availability and willingness of others in professional and nonprofessional roles to give support within relationships of care. The authors discuss themes emerging from the interviews in connection with the apparent mismatch between women's lived realities and the policy assumptions supporting the development of e-health strategies for providing health information to people living in rural and remote communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins by reviewing several of the ways in which social inclusion has been conceptualized in the literature. The paper then explores these approaches in the context of the provision of preschool education in rural Scotland. Preschool education is viewed by government as a powerful weapon in the fight against social exclusion, but higher per capita costs in rural areas as well as the availability and cost of transport are major problems, raising questions in turn about inclusive models of provision. Moreover, many parents are sceptical about their ability to access preschool education for their children while also continuing their own engagement in the labour market (a central pillar of social inclusion policy). Issues of choice, quality and governance arise and these are discussed in depth. The paper concludes with some reflections on the concept of social inclusion in the light of this case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study considers whether rural status or living in a particular region of the United States has effects on mental and physical health. The analyses examine whether there are independent and interactive effects of rural status and region of residence on health, beyond individual level factors related to poverty. Methods: Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models are used to examine the relationships between rural and regional residence and health across three time periods. Results: Negative health effects of rural residence were found only in the South region. Positive health effects of rural residence were found only in the Midwest region. There are no observed health risks associated with rural or regional residence across group. Discussion: The results indicate a cumulative risk of rural and Southern residence for older men and women. Living in a rural place in the mid-western United States seems to provide unique sources of health benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis departs from prior macro-level homicide research by focusing on gender-specific homicide rates in rural areas, a completely neglected topic. Drawing on the resource deprivation and gender inequality perspectives, the authors analyze gender-disaggregated homicide offending rates in 1,678 rural counties. Negative binomial regression models provide evidence of the following: Gender-specific measures of unemployment and poverty and a measure of female-headed households exhibit no relationship with female homicide offending, whereas all three measures are associated with elevated levels of male homicide offending. Further, measures of both absolute and relative gender inequality have no association with female or male homicide offending in the rural context. Overall, female homicide offending in rural areas is strongly driven by levels of male offending, which are explained by many of the same factors typically cited in the literature on urban crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forty years ago Philip M. Hauser (1962) argued that classifying all urbanites without regard to their rural origins ignored the cultural effects of rural life on recreation. A population of urbanites who grew up in rural areas should be more likely to participate in hunting, for example, than multigenerational urbanites, because of the rural cultural influences on hunting. This article extends Hauser’s logic to attitudes toward hunting, wildlife, and wolves. Does where a city resident grew up make any difference? Do contacts with the countryside have an influence on the attitudes of urbanites? This article’s data, based on a national survey of Swedes, show that multigenerational urbanites, those who where born in cities of parents who lived in cities have more negative attitudes toward hunting and toward wolves, and feel that wildlife is less important, in comparison to those with rural experience. Urban residents who had more contact with the countryside had more positive attitudes toward hunting, wildlife, and wolves. As fewer urban Swedes have rural origins, support for wildlife, hunting and wolves may be expected to decline. Cultural or management actions that increase urban residents’ contacts with rural areas could, however, help promote or maintain more positive attitudes toward wildlife-related attitude objects such as hunting and wolves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Documents the characteristics of rural Canada in relation to the situation in other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries. Commonalities and differences among rural populations; Debate on policy alternatives to enhance the future of rural peoples; Finding that agriculture is not the major source of employment in the predominantly rural regions of OECD countries.

Discusses the results of a nighttime roadside survey of rural Alberta drivers, which was conducted to quantify the nature and extent of impaired driving on Alberta's rural roads during nighttime. Description of driver demographics and information about the trip; Measurement of drivers' blood alcohol level; Estimated number of persons that died in alcohol-related crashes on Alberta roads in 1998.

This article examines reasons why there is no shift from government to governance, that is, a new process of governing, in the Russian countryside. It begins by analyzing the difference between government and governance. In general, there are reasons why governance in rural areas can be considered multidimensional. The chief amongst them is that it includes not only the public and private sectors but also communities and voluntary groups. Therefore it is very important for local government to get in contact with different actors. However, the problem inherent in such a system is that any single actor lacks the knowledge or capacity to tackle problems effectively. In cases where local government is the main and almost single actor in Russian rural areas, there is no shift from government to governance. Another factor which can determine whether there is a shift from government to governance is the transition of the Russian economy to the market economy. A significant factor which has prevented the shift from government to governance is the lack of uniform comprehension of what "self-government" means. By and large, village population believes that the head of the district government and the heads of village administrations are executors of state politics and not exponents of people's interests.