This book explores the notion of rurality and how it is used and produced in various contexts, including within populist politics which derives their legitimacy from the rural-urban divide.
The gap between the ‘common people’ and the ‘elites’ is widening again as images of rurality are promoted as morally pure, unalienated and opposed to the cultural and economic globalization. This book examines how using certain images and projections of rurality produces ‘rural authenticity’, a concept propagated by various groups of people such as regional food producers, filmmakers, policymakers, and lobbyists. It seeks to answer questions such as: What is the rurality that these groups of people refer to? How is it produced? What are the purposes that it serves? Research in this book addresses these questions from the areas of both politics and policies of the ‘authentic rural’. The ‘politics’ refers to polarizations including politicians, social movements, and political events which accentuate the rural-urban divide and brings it back to the core of the societal conflict, while the ’policies’ focus on rural tourism, heritage industry, popular art and other areas where rurality is constantly produced and consumed.
With international case studies from leading scholars in the field of rural studies, the book will appeal to geographers, sociologists, politicians, as well as those interested in the re-emergence of the rural-urban divide in politics and media.
Chapter 8 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
1. Rural Authenticity Between Commodification and Populism Part 1: Politics of Rural Authenticity 2. City and Countryside in the Imagining of Nations 3. Revisiting the Politics of the Rural and the Brexit Vote 4. Populism of the Dispossessed: Rethinking the Link between Rural Authenticity and Populism in the Context of Neoliberal Regional Governance 5. The Minister’s Tears and the Strike of the Invisible. The Political Debate on the ""Regulatization"" of Undocumented Migrant Farm Labourers During the Covid 19 Health Crisis in Italy 6. Political and Apolitical Dimensions of Russian, Rural Development: Populism ‘From Above’ and Narodnik Small Deeds ‘From Below’ 7. The Feeling of Being Robbed Part 2: Policies of Rural Authenticity 8. #Proudofthefarmer: Authenticity, Populism and Rural Masculinity in the 2019 Dutch Farmers’ Protests 9. Idyllic Politics and Politics of the Idyll 10. Dystopia as Authenticity: Changing Ruralities in Icelandic Cinema 11. Rural Authenticity as Cosmopolitan Modernity? Local Political Narratives on Immigration and Integration in Rural Norway 12. Dynamics of Changes in the Farmers’ Contestation in Poland in 1989-2018: On the Way to Rationality and an Institutionalized Model of Collaboration 13. Rurality: From the Margin Back to the Focus of Interest
Pavel Pospěch is Associate Professor of sociology at the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic and a Faculty Fellow of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology. He has published in topics in urban sociology, rural sociology and cultural theory. Eirik Magnus Fuglestad is a researcher at Ruralis – Institute for rural and regional research, Trondheim, Norway. His research interests lie in the intersection between nationalism, property rights and rural and agricultural development, looking at these fields form a historical sociological perspective. Elisabete Figueiredo is Associate Professor with Habilitation at the Department of Social, Political and Territorial Sciences and Full Researcher at GOVCOPP, a Research Unit in Governance, Competitiveness and Public Policies at University of Aveiro, Portugal. She has published in topics as rural sociology, environmental sociology and risk perceptions.
