Keith Halfacree

Locality and Social Representation: Space, Discourse and Alternative Definitions of the Rural.

Abstract There is currently a debate taking place in the ‘rural’ literature concerning the fundamental issue of the definition of ‘the rural’. Two main conventional approaches to this issue are to define the rural in either descriptive or socio-cultural terms. However, both can be criticized from a theoretical standpoint for adopting an inadequate conceptualization of space. As a result, there is an increasing but problematic tendency to try to define the rural in terms of a distinctive type of locality. However, there is yet another means of definition, which has been somewhat neglected in the literature. This alternative can best be approached from an understanding of the theory of social representations and the contrasting discourses of academics and non-academics. A modified version of the theory enables us to define the rural in terms of the disembodied cognitive structures which we use as rules and resources in order to make sense of our everyday world, through both discursive and non-discursive actions. Moreover, in an increasingly post-modern era it can be argued that such an ‘immaterial’ definition may be assuming dominance over its locality-based alternative.

A Cross-National Comparison of the Impact of Family Migration on Women's Employment Status

In this paper we consider the effects of family migration on women’s employment status, using census microdata from Great Britain and the United States. We test a simple hypothesis that families tend to move long distances in favor of the male’s career and that this can have a detrimental effect on women’s employment status. Unlike many previous studies of this question, our work emphasizes the importance of identifying couples that have migrated together, rather than simply comparing long-distance (fe)male migrants with nonmigrant (fe)males individually. We demonstrate that women’s employment status is harmed by family migration; the results we present are surprisingly consistent for Great Britain and the United States, despite differing economic situations and cultural norms regarding gender and migration. We also demonstrate that studies that fail to identify linked migrant couples are likely to underestimate the negative effects of family migration on women’s employment status.

Gender inequality in employment status following family migration in GB and the US: the effect of relative occupational status

Presents the findings of a study of long distance migrations for employment opportunities in both the US and the UK. Compares the cross‐national differences between the two countries and tries to investigate the effects of the relative resources of the partner in their subsequent search for employment. Attempts to discover any gender differences based upon occupational status. Evaluates the similarity and differences between the countries.

The Effect of Long-Distance Family Migration and Motherhood on Partnered Women's Labour-Market Activity Rates in Great Britain and the USA

Many studies of long-distance family migration demonstrate that female partners are often disenfranchised in the labour market. One factor that has not been fully considered is the role of children. Heterosexual couples may be more likely to migrate in favour of the male ‘breadwinners’ career if the couple have children, or are planning to commence childrearing in the foreseeable future. However, little work seems to have examined this empirically. The authors focus on the influence of ‘motherhood’ in different national contexts, using comparable census microdata for Great Britain and the United States. They test whether apparent ‘tied migration’ effects may in fact be influenced by family decisions related to childbearing/childrearing, and two sets of modelling results are provided. First, they examine whether the effects of long-distance family migration on womens labour-market status is influenced by the presence or absence of children of different ages. Second, they conduct the same analysis for women who have a high-status occupation. The results demonstrate that women in families with young children are most likely to be out of employment after family migration. A smaller, but similar, tied-migration effect exists for families with older children and families with no children. The same pattern exists for women in high-status occupations. Tied migration appears to influence womens labour-market status equally in Great Britain and the United States, regardless of the presence or absence of children.

‘A solid partner in a fluid world’ and/or ‘line of flight’? Interpreting second homes in the era of mobilities

The article is the product of the authors recent engagements in rural second home research in Norway. Sensing that the predominant everyday ‘meaning’ of second homes within Nordic countries generally is markedly different from the UK, the article draws attention to how they are contextually interpreted. From a focus on everyday life and post-capitalist critique, attention is given to the diversity of interpretations applicable to second homes consumption. Whilst ‘mainstream’ interpretations or readings tend to stress either the ‘elite’ character of second homes consumption or rootedness within more democratic ‘tradition’, foregrounding the context of the ‘era of mobilities’ presents two different readings. First, second home consumption appears congruent with a ‘dynamic heterolocalist’ existence, whereby ‘home’ is distributed across places of differing experiential qualities for the consumer. Second, and more radically, the latter reading can be challenged. It is suggested that instead of being functional for achieving home within the era of mobilities, second home consumption, not least through association with both representational and more-than-representational aspects of rurality, traces an attempted ‘line of flight’ to a heterotopic place and to potentially post-capitalist existential priorities. The conclusion calls for more in-depth research on second home consumption, whilst noting that despite any earlier radical message second homes remain elite forms of consumption.

‘Rurality and post-rurality’

Rurality is that which makes somewhere, someone, or something rural. With this statement, consensus largely ends. Consequently, this article introduces the status of rurality to the reader from four different, sometimes conflicting, sometimes complementary, perspectives. First, it indicates why many authors have suggested that rurality no longer remains a useful or significant category within social science, notwithstanding its widespread popular resilience. Second, it returns to the challenge posed by the latter resilience to argue that this cannot be dismissed so easily. Indeed, it is through popular representations that rurality retains much ontological distinctiveness. Moreover, the suggestion, from Baudrillard, of ‘map preceding territory’ (rather than vice versa) suggests, third, a rurality much less spatially confined than immediately expected, a state some researchers have called post-rurality. Complicating things still further, adding a nonrepresentational affective aspect leads, fourth, to the proposal that there may still be something in human existential experiences of and engagements with rurality that also support retaining the term as a valid social scientific concept. The article concludes with a model of the rural than going some way to reconciling these perspectives, while accepting that rurality today remains inherently plural, hybrid, and still partly ‘undiscovered’.

'A little learning is a dangerous thing': a reply to Ron Skeldon

From the outset we would like to emphasize that we are pleased that our article (Halfacree and Boyle, 1993) has generated some interest beyond these shores, notably in the form of Skeldon’s (1994) critical response. As our concluding sentence stated, the article was intended to ’stimulate further debate’ (Halfacree and Boyle, 1993:345). This was an outcome which we thought would inevitably come from the proposed revisiting and (it is hoped) reintegration of the various strands of migration research. With Skeldon (1994: 91-96), we agree strongly that all population geographers, not least ourselves, need

‘Glow worms show the path we have to tread’: the counterurbanisation of Vashti Bunyan

Although ‘counterurbanisation’ is very widely acknowledged and studied, certain elements of this migration-led phenomenon lack detailed scrutiny. These gaps need filling in order to appreciate the full flowering of the phenomenon in specific social-cultural, geographical and historical contexts; to enable comparison between these diverse expressions; and to examine their relationships with contemporaneous rural socio-cultural restructuring. One neglected element is counterurbanisation fairly directly informed by the late 1960s/1970s counterculture, a migration strand quickly stereotyped as the ‘hippie’ ‘getting her/his head together in the countryside’. This paper uses the example of British singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan, notably through the gestation and content of her Just Another Diamond Day album of 1970, to illustrate and examine countercultural counterurbanisation. With an additional nod to affective aspects of rurality, it also suggests something of what the lengthy rural journey Bunyan made from London to the Scottish islands, a key inspiration for the 1970 album, provided for her at a difficult, challenging, yet ultimately rewarding period in her life. Indeed, her experiences of (trying to engage with) the countryside on this journey are described as heterotopic, an association which leads the paper to suggest a more general heterotopic status for rurality within counterurbanisation.

Introduction: turning neglect into engagement within rural geographies of childhood and youth

[S]cholarship on the spaces of childhood must focus on more than just the specifics of particular sets of children in particular places, and must do more than just probe the micro-scale, agency-based geographies of childhood behaviour, experience, perception and fantasy. ... scholarship must also look to the larger picture encompassing many different sets of children spread across many different places, and must accept the challenge of tackling the macro-scale, structure-based geographies of childhood as shaped by broad-brush political-economic and social-cultural transformations (Chris Philo, 2000, p. 253).

Interface: exclusive countrysides? rural gentrification, consumer preferences and planning

Over the last two decades, rural localities within advanced capitalist societies have witnessed unprecedented changes and ruptures to local economies, new demands for rural space, and shifting rural politics, leading to a dramatic reconstitution of rural populations and the formation of a new set of rural social geographies (Bell & Osti, 2010; Marsden, 2009). Many rural places, for example, have experienced profound changes to housing and land markets (Smith, 2007) with a growing desire for rural living and an extended spatial mobility that is leading to increased competition for rural resource use. With the demise of dominant productivist agricultural models and the emergence of diverse consumer and societal demands for rural space, spatial planning has the potential to move centre-stage in the regulation of the countryside and managing rural change processes. However, as Campbell asked in a 2003 Interface on rural planning, which and whose countryside are we planning for? This Interface aims to explore one dimension of this changing countryside, by examining the gentrification of rural space and its implications for planning practice in rural localities. Gentrification, referring to the transformation of an area into a middle-class space, has most commonly been studied in urban contexts in advanced capitalist societies; however, increasingly authors have broadened the geography of gentrification studies to include gentrification processes within suburban and rural localities. While early accounts of gentrification were largely associated with distinctive landscapes of urban renovation and renaissance (Davidson & Lees, 2005) as working class neighbourhoods in global cities were transformed by new social geographies, as gentrification matures, both as a concept and as a process, new spaces of gentrification have emerged, both globally and down the urban hierarchy (Lees et al., 2010). Butler (2007), for example, suggests that the growth of large city regions have created whole new areas that have become desirable places to live, not just in the city, but also in the suburbs and beyond where previous inhabitants have found themselves moving aside for the new expanded post-industrial classes. Similarly, Phillips (2004) has been critical of the narrow gentrification research focus on urban geographies, while Smith (2002) argues that gentrification is not only apparent in a range of spatial scales, but also manifests at a range of locations—suburban, rural, inner urban and retirement hotpots such as coastal resorts. This has led Smith to call for the need to “widen the spatial lens” of gentrification studies. In this context, Davidson and Lees (2005) suggest four key elements of gentrification not attached to a specific landscape or