Rural Be/longing and Rural Social Organizations: Conviviality and Community-Making in the English Countryside

Abstract

This article considers how structures of community feeling and ways of belonging are produced, maintained and recreated in local rural environments. It argues that rural social organizations, which operate through, and are embedded in, notions of conviviality and community, have taken up a particular role in this process. While using the concept of community with all the usual sociological caveats in place, the article seeks to emphasize a) the importance of the sociality of community and b) the need to understand the ways in which this sociality is continually shaped by the potent imaginary of what `community' and, more specifically, what `rural community' mean and represent. Drawing on a qualitative data set the article details the emotional connectivity participants made between the local and the social and the everyday routine practices involved in constructing a community sensibility. It concludes by examining how ambiguity and governance are part of these processes.

Community and Conviviality? Informal Social Life in Multicultural Places

“…Given that intensifying and evolving formations of multiculture characterize most contemporary urban environments it would be, as Heil (2014) It is in this context that we seek to extend and thicken conviviality's meanings through the emphasis that the rethinking around community puts on social In what follows, we turn to focus more directly on the role of social leisure organisations. Such a focus makes it possible to explore their established and participatory social life, in which acquaintance, interaction and social connection are purposively and consciously sought, expected and maintained (Neal and Walters 2009). Bringing community and conviviality together as a frame through which to understand social leisure organisations plays to their uncertain, in/exclusionary dynamic and moves discussion of conviviality much more directly and explicitly into the spaces of connective social life and away from a focus on young people and away from 'in-passing' urban landscapes and the anonymous public spaces that define them, such as markets, buses, parks, streets and cafes.…”

“…Our focus on social leisure organizations was part of a wider engagement with everyday social lives in places. Sociology has a wellestablished interest in social leisure groups and their role in social relations (see for example; Elias and Dunning 1986;Putnam 2000;Neal and Walters 2009;Morgan 2009;Lake 2013;Spaaij et al 2014 ) and, finding a space between the exclusionary and inclusionary interpretations of social leisure organisations, we examine how they may work as participatory sites generating un/easy place-making, emotive social connection and embodied collaborative practice in broader processes of conviviality in which difference was simultaneously significant and subsumed into a shared sameness.…”

“Community Aware” education policy: Enhancing individual and community vitality

“…Here, community refers to the network of relations in which people interact and to which they have an affinity, which may coincide with the places they live in or be thought of in terms of their common interests or identities (through, for example, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, etc.). Community can also derive from informal or semi-formal associations and interventions that give people a feeling of connection and security (Neal & Walters, 2008). While compositional factors in the make-up and circumstances of local communities of place matter to well-being, particularly in terms of the balance of risk and protective factors, it is recognized that there are processes and mechanisms through which places have functions-namely, interactions, social supports, and social capital-that influence resilience (Chaskin, 2008;Howard & Johnson, 2000).…”

Rural Putsch: Power, Class, Social Relations and Change in the English Rural Village

“…That is, shared and mutually supportive relationships within the resident community of each zone. For instance, fostering the appreciated 'looking out' for others' welfare (Neal and Walters 2008): Mrs R Well, I think on the whole people help each other out in the village, particularly round here. R Oh yes.…”