The resituated rural: exploring narratives beyond the empty Spain

International Conference Socioecos 2024

“…This journalism has a social and ecological dimension that grounds what I defined as the resituated rural (Castelló, 2023a): socioecological narratives (documentary, journalism, cinema, literature) that overcomes the limitations of harmful imaginaries of the unsustainable growth fantasy applied to rural life and work. They are narratives of the possibility of the rural in what Anna Tsing (2015) identified as the ruins of capitalism.…”

“…In parallel, I conducted two short qualitative interviews with the editor-in-chief of each magazine. It is a qualitative approach to test practical applications of the concept of the resituated rural-that has been previously proposed and discussed (Castelló, 2023a(Castelló, , 2023c)-and to identify how journalism can become a socioecological practice.…”

“…The latter was successfully introduced by the remarkable essay by Sergio del Molino ( 2016), but rapidly mutated to a more politized version of vaciada (emptied), an expression implicitly claiming that some agent was involved in the depopulation and impoverishment of the countryside. It was since the late 2010s that I annotated the presence of a new discourse that started to renovate social accounts of the rural (Castelló, 2023a(Castelló, , 2023c. I named this the resituated rural, a narrative movement that implies a renewed conceptual approach to agriculture, land, and animals.…”

Voices from the emptiness. Developing the agentic rural on Spanish television

“…One comparative approach noted that the rural idyll was very present in lifestyle magazines (Baylina and Berg, 2010). More recently, I have proposed the notion of 'relocated rural' to explain how Spanish cultural production and media are challenging stereotypes and promoting innovative depictions of the countryside (Castelló, 2023).…”