The two-ness of rural life and the ends of rural scholarship

Amenity migration: diverse conceptualizations of drivers, socioeconomic dimensions, and emerging challenges

“…As McCarthy (2008, p. 131) observes, ''understanding amenity migration demands investigation of the widely circulating imaginaries, meanings, and performances coded as 'rural' that generate demand for, and somewhat orchestrate the production and use of, particular commodifications of rural landscapes.'' Perhaps the most important social dynamic related to amenity migration in rural areas is the construction and importation of rural ideals (or ''idylls,'' see Bell 2007) by the primarily urban in-migrants (Halfacree 1994;Cadieux 2010). Smith and Phillips (2001, p. 458) argue that ''the consumption of reinvented images of rurality can provide a source of identity, shared living experiences, membership of social space and group, and can be perceived as a medium for obtaining a 'sense of place' in the world.…”

Village Schools in England: At the Heart of Their Community?

“…According to Bell (2007), in the quixotic desire of modernism to provide the rural with a presence, it 'sought boundaries in the boundless' (p. 409) and as such, while offering a materially defined object for study, opened the way for postmodern scholars, to reformulate a position which he referred to as the second rural.…”

“…Drawing theoretically on Bell (2007) and Halfacree (2007), we conceive of the notion of heart in both normative and idealised terms; as problematically denoting a physical geographic centre, a political policy discourse, and an organic everyday function.…”

Constructions of local culture and impacts on domestic violence in an Australian rural community

“…In the last two decades there has been increased interest in how people construct spaces and places, and how they instil meaning into certain places, and there has been considerable debate about what is rural (Bell, 2007). It has been argued that rural cannot be defined by trying to objectify it, and so the search for one generalised rural culture is replaced by a concern about how places are made, multiple meanings and identities in a place, and how dominance of certain meanings and identities are maintained and sustained in particular places at particular times (Philo, 1992;Murdoch and Pratt, 1993;Whatmore et al, 1994;Little and Austin, 1996;Martinez-Brawley, 2001).…”