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

Abstract

This article analyses rural representations in the documentary series Ruralitas (2020) on the Spanish TVE. The programme shows that the people living in the countryside have agency and do not conform to common rural stereotypes. Nevertheless, the stories flirt with ideas of the ‘rural idyll’ by focusing on the beauty of the landscape and traditional rural versus urban binaries. However, the series also develops what the author names an agentic rural. The agentic rural not only empowers countryside dwellers and portrays self-determined destinies in the countryside, but also highlights problems associated with depopulation.

International Conference Socioecos 2024

“…One of its characteristics is the empowering of rural communities in a narrative choice that gives greater capacity to the locals, the dwellers of small villages, to transform their realities and to work and live in the rural. I named this storytelling choice the agentic rural (Castelló, 2023b), and it is a way of narrating in which individuals are conscious subjects that decide to live and develop in their places.…”