Identity, protest and the agency
of the rural as meeting-place
Michael Woods
Aberystwyth University
m.woods@aber.ac.uk
ESRS Congress 2009, Vaasa
Thematic Symposium III: What is the Agency of the Rural?
Do you remember
what you were doing
on 23rd May 2007?
Chinese Government No 1 Policy Documents:
• Increasing Farmers‟ Incomes (2004)
• Improving Agricultural Production Capacity (2005)
• Advancing the „Building a New Countryside‟ scheme
(2006)
• Developing Modern Agriculture (2007)
• Resolving Rural Problems (2008)
• Stabilizing Agricultural Prices and Increasing Farmers‟
Incomes (2009)
“the countryside is in urban hands already,
as it has been since the city generated its
trade and capital” (Barnett, 1998)
The political resilience of the rural
1930s-40s: Rural preservationist movement takes
on unregulated urban expansion and wins
protection for rural landscapes
1940s-50s: Farm unions secure massive financial
support for agriculture through CAP etc
1970s-80s: Rural community movement fights for
the right to develop
1990s-2000s: New rural identity politics?
Neglect of the Rural?
“There is a hell of a lot of distrust about the
political decision making process, a lot of people
are quite disturbed about that and a lot of people
feel that government, central government
particularly, has little understanding of rural
communities. A lot of them display very little
understanding about how rural communities are
being changed. A lot of people think rural
communities are just forgotten about.”
Windfarm campaign leader, Devon
Neglect of the Rural?
“This initiative arose as a response to the
frustration and concern felt by country people
against the threats posed to the countryside and
their jobs, by politicians and urban influence,
through prejudice, ignorance and diminishing
rural representation”
Countryside Rally Mission Statement 1997
The Politics of the Rural
• Countryside protests not an expression of ruralurban
conflict
• But the „politics of the rural‟ in which the
meaning and regulation of rurality is the central
issue of debate (Woods, 2003, JRS)
• Builds on Mormont (1987, IJURR)
• It is the centrality of this struggle over the
meaning and regulation of rurality that
constitutes the agency of the rural today.
The agency of the rural
• Rural protests and movements demonstrate the
agency of rural people to organize and mobilize
politically
• And to sometimes have an impact of policy
outcomes
• But this is the agency of rural citizenship, not the
agency of the rural per se
Rural as motivation
“The countryside has given to me so much in my
life; I want to give something back.”
Anti-windfarm campaigner, Powys
“We cannot and will not stand by in silence and
watch our countryside, our communities and way
of life destroyed forever by misguided urban
political correctness.”
Baroness Mallalieu addressing
the Countryside Rally 1997
The agency of the rural
• Ideas of rurality have agency in motivating rural
citizens to mobilise on their behalf
• But – ideas of rurality would have no agency
without citizens to act for them
• Rural citizens would not mobilize on these issues
without the influence of a perceived rural identity
• The agency of the rural lies in the combination
of discourses of rurality as inspiration and
mobilized rural citizens in action
Translation approach
• Corresponds with concept of agency advanced
by translation sociologists, e.g Latour, Law,
Callon
• Agency, or power, only exists through
associations that are fixed in actor-networks or
hybrid collectifs
• Agnostic stance that does not differentiate
between human and non-human actants
Countryside
Alliance
Fox Hunts Hunt Supporters
Clubs
Rural people
Media
Wealthy Donors
Rural configurations
• Certain discourses of rurality gain purchase
because they involve the configuration of social,
cultural, environmental and moral components in
a unique way that is attractive to particular social
groups
• Rural idyll as discursive configuration of
environmental factors (peace, tranquillity), social
practices (community interaction), landscape
features and moral principles
• Individual components may not be exclusively
rural, but specific configurations only occur in the
countryside
Social processes Economic processes
Labour
relations
Family
relations
Cultural
conventions
Landscape
practices
The rural as „meeting-place‟
• The hybrid countryside: “defined by networks in
which heterogeneous entities are aligned in a
variety of ways” (Murdoch, 2003)
• “these networks give rise to slightly different
countrysides: there is no single vantage point
from which the panopoly of rural or countryside
relations can be seen” (Murdoch, 2003)
• “thrown-togetherness” of place (Massey, 2005)
The rural as meeting-place
• Rural change occurs by modifying individual
components in rural configurations, substituting
them for different components, or re-arranging
existing components in new ways
• Rural restructuring has brought rural
configurations closer in form and character to
urban configurations
• But urban forms have not been wholly replicated
• Given rise to new hybrid forms (cf Lacour and
Puissant, 2007)
“The reconstitution of rural spaces under globalization results
from the permeability of rural localities as hybrid assemblages
of human and non-human entities, knitted-together
intersections of networks and flows that are never wholly fixed
or contained at the local scale, and whose constant shapeshifting
eludes a singular representation of place.
Globalization processes introduce into rural localities new
networks of global interconnectivity, which become threaded
through and entangled with existing local assemblages,
sometimes acting in concert and sometimes pulling local
actants in conflicting directions. Through these
entanglements, intersections and entrapments, the
experience of globalization changes rural places, but it never
eradicates the local. Rather, the networks, flows and actors
introduced by globalization processes fuse and combine with
extant local entities to produce new hybrid formations. In this
way, places in the emergent global countryside retain their
local distinctiveness, but they are also different to how they
were before.”
(Woods, 2007, Progress in Human Geography).
The agency of the rural
• As altering just one component in a discursive or
material configuration can affect its unique
character as an expression of the rural,
mobilizations in defence of the rural can be
triggered by seemingly small-scale actions and
changes
• As rural change proceeds through a process of
negotiation and hybridization, rural communities
are active in their own transformation and have
agency to influence their own futures
DERREG
• Developing Europe’s Rural Regions in the Era of
Globalisation
• European Commission Framework Programme 7
• January 2009 – December 2011
• Aberystwyth University (UK) (Lead partner)
• Leibniz Institut fur Landerkunde (Germany)
• LAEI (Lithuania)
• Mendel University (Czech Republic)
• National University of Ireland, Galway
• Nordregio (Sweden)
• Universitat des Saarlandes (Germany)
• Univerza v Ljubljana (Slovenia)
• Wageningen Universiteit (Netherlands)
www.derreg.eu
The agency of the rural
• We can also think of the agency of the
rural in terms of the outcomes that result
from configurations and associations
– Food
– Fuel
– Energy
– Water
– Relaxation and recreation
– Ecosystem services
The future is
in the
countryside?
The future is in the countryside?
• The resolution of many key challenges for the
world today rely on rural agency as enacted
through existing and new configurations of
social, economic, environmental and cultural
components
– Food security
– Protecting biodiversity
– Limiting global warming
– Producing renewable energy
The future is in the countryside?
• In an ever more urbanized world, the agency of
the rural to produce supplies of food and water
and clean energy will become ever more critical
• The shape of the rural-as-meeting-place, and
the form of configurations constituting the
discursive and material being of the rural, will be
significant questions for both urban and rural
populations
The role of social scientists
• The role of rural social scientists is to
disentangle the rural, to see how it works
• Requires methodological and theoretical
creativity
• New methods for following connections and
examining micro-politics and micro-actions
• New theories as existing concepts and
definitions are destablised
• Reaching out across disciplines (social-natural
science) and spaces (rural-urban)