Critical Rural Theory provides an exploratory foundation for anyone interested in examining the hegemonic power of urbanization and its impacts on rural people and places. This book is without parallel in the rural sociological literature for its commitment to uncovering the power of culture in addition to structure and space in maintaining urban power.

The world has been witnessing a long unfolding process of urbanization that not only has altered the structural basis of society in terms of political economy, but has also symbolically relegated rural people and life to a secondary or deviant status through an ideology of urbanormativity. Both structural and cultural changes rooted in urbanization are connected in complex ways to spatial arrangements that can be described in terms of inequality and uneven development. Through a focus on localities, Studies in Urbanormativity: Rural Community in Urban Society examines the implications of urbanization and its corresponding ideology. Urbanormativity justifies rural domination by holding urban life as the standard against which rural forms are compared and deemed to be irregular, inferior, or deviant. Urban production, as conceptualized in this book, is inherently exploitative of rural resources—natural, social, cultural, and symbolic. As this exploitation advances, a wake of entropic conditions is left behind in the forms of degraded landscapes, broken social institutions, and denigrated communities, cultures and identities. Edited by Gregory M. Fulkerson and Alexander R. Thomas, Studies in Urbanormativity engages a topic on which scholars have been surprisingly silent. Designed for advancing theory and practice, the chapters provide new theoretical tools for understanding the complex relationship between the urban and rural. While primarily intended for scholars and practitioners interested in rural life, rural policy, and community development, the insights of this book will also be of interest to scholars studying various forms of cultural and social domination, as well as identity politics.

'This is a unique interpretation of rural issues that will become essential reference for students, scholars, politicians, developers and rural activists...' - Imre Kovach, President, European Society for Rural Sociology, Research director, Institute for Political Sciences, Budapest

Rural crime is a fast growing area of interest among scholars in criminology. From studies of agricultural crime in Australia, to violence against women in Appalachia America, to poaching in Uganda, to land theft in Brazil -- the criminology community has come to recognize that crime manifests itself in rural localities in ways that both conform to and challenge conventional theory and research. For the first time, Rural Criminology brings together contemporary research and conceptual considerations to synthesize rural crime studies from a critical perspective. This book dispels four rural crime myths, challenging conventional criminological theories about crime in general. It also examines both the historical development of rural crime scholarship, recent research and conceptual developments. The third chapter recreates the critical in the rural criminology literature through discussions of three important topics: community characteristics and rural crime, drug use, production and trafficking in the rural context, and agricultural crime. Never before has rural crime been examined comprehensively, using any kind of theoretical approach, whether critical or otherwise. Rural Criminology does both, pulling together in one short volume the diverse array of empirical research under the theoretical umbrella of a critical perspective. This book will be of interest to those studying or researching in the fields of rural crime, critical criminology and sociology.

This book investigates urbanormativity—a concept that privileges urban normalcy and desirability over rural deviance and undesirability. The “reality” section outlines its foundations—urbanization, urban-rural systems, and urban dependency. The “representation” section explores urbanormative culture by considering cultural capital, media, and identity. The last section, “everyday life,” examines urban-rural disparities in law and politics and in life within different communities. It concludes by calling for a rural justice approach that will revalue the rural.

This book arises out of an ESRC project devoted to an examination of the economic, social and cultural impacts of the service class on rural areas. The research was an attempt to document these impacts through close empirical work in a set of three rural communities, but something happened on the way. The authors found that the rural became a real sticking point. Respondents used it in different ways - as a bludgeon, as a badge, as a barometer - to signify many different things - security, identity, community, domesticity, gender, sexuality, ethnicity - nearly always by drawing on many different sources - the media, the landscape, friends and kin, animals. It became abundantly clear that the rural, whatever chameleon form it took, was a prime and deeply felt determinant of the actions of many respondents. Yet it was also clear that to the authors they possessed no theoretical framework that could allow them to negotiate the rural to deconstruct its diverse nature as a category. Rather each of the extended essays in the book is an attempt by each author to draw out one aspect of the rural by drawing on different traditions in social and cultural theory.

Reimagining Rural: Urbanormative Portrayals of Rural Life examines the ways in which rural people and places are being portrayed by popular television, reality television, film, literature, and news media in the United States. It is also an examination of the social processes that reinforce urbanormative standards that normalize urban life and render rural life as something unusual, exotic, or deviant. This includes exploring the role of the media as agenda setting agent, informing people what and how to think about rural life. Further it includes scrutinizing the institution of formal education that promotes a homogenous urban-oriented curriculum, while in the process, marginalizing the unique characteristics of local rural communities. These contributions are some of the only studies of their kind, investigating popular cultural representations of rural life, while providing powerful evidence and unique challenges for an urban society to rethink and reimagine rural life, while confronting the many stereotypes and myths that exist.