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The special edition of the journal "Sociologia Rurails" seeks to redress imbalance by positioning the rural more centrally within recent developments and debates focused on social natures. The seven papers that make this volume were originally were presented in a workshop of the XIX Congress of the European Society for Rural Sociology that took place in 2001 in Dijon, France. This special edition commences with two papers that provide broad reviews of the position of animals within recent writings on social nature. In the first of these papers, Hilary Tovey focuses on what she terms the invisibility of animals within sociology. Reviewing recent writings on social nature, she argues that animals have either been ignored altogether or have been subsumed into wild nature, leaving domestic animals, and particularly those linked to agriculture, othered within sociological literatures. For Tovey, domestic animals pose a problem for sociologists of nature, in that they cannot be comfortably positioned within either nature or culture. She shows how such animals play an important role in shaping dominant representations of rurality and particular rural (farming) cultures, and argues that domestic animals need to be taken more seriously by environmental and rural sociologists so that more appropriate theoretical understandings of rural society can be developed.

This article focuses on several abstracts published in the journal "Sociologia Ruralis." The paper "Theorising Nature and Society in Sociology: The Invisibility of Animals," by Hilary Tovey argues that animals are central to rural social life and a rural sociology needs to develop theorizations of the rural which incorporate this fact. It looks to environmental sociology, the sociology of the relations between nature and society, for help in this respect, but argues that the debates which have characterized recent sociology of the environment have focused attention on the problems of conceptualizing nature at the expense of attempts to reonceptualise society. The paper "Communities in Nature: The Construction and Understanding of Forest Natures," by Terry Marsden, Paul Milbourne, Lawrence Kitchen and Kevin Bishop outlines three different but interrelated theoretical strands associated with contemporary society-nature debates; namely social constructionism, realism and ecological modernization. By using empirical evidence from a case study of community and forestry interactions in a South Wales ex-mining village, the paper argues for the need to incorporate into these theoretical debates a deeper analysis of community understandings and practices.

Abstract The recent ‘Liberty and Livelihood’ March in London highlights how the issue of hunting with dogs, which directly involves only a small minority of people in the British countryside and, opinion polls indicate, is opposed by the majority of the British population, can still dominate national political and media agendas. A key tactic of the March organisers, the Countryside Alliance, was to present hunting as an embedded part of rural life, emphasising important connections between natural discourses of rurality, hunting and broader rural social issues.It is these claimed embedded natures of hunting in rural areas that form the focus of this paper. Drawing on recent research in four case-study hunting areas in the English and Welsh countryside, the paper positions hunting within a broader rural socio-cultural context. It explores community understandings of and interactions with hunting, and considers the broader sociocultural role of hunting in these rural spaces. The case-studies indicate that while hunting may be described as a socially and culturally embedded practice in these areas, its place within the rural community is bound up with a great deal of social and spatial complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is set within the context of a growing interest in the gendered nature of rurality and of rural life, and in particular in the context of an emerging literature on rural masculinities. It focuses on rural men and in particular on the phenomenon of rising male rural suicide rates. The paper reviews existing research in order to ascertain the validity of popular claims of high and rising suicide rates among young men in rural Ireland, and explores possible explanations for this phenomenon. It draws on medical and psychological literature but sets this material in a wider geographical context, focusing on processes of contemporary rural restructuring and the oft-cited masculinity crisis. The paper concludes that in order to understand the processes behind rising male suicide rates, we need to understand the struggles for power and identity that are going on in places, and the movements of people in and out of places. Therefore geography and gender studies can contribute to a greater understanding of the phenomenon, suggesting that this is an area that merits further interdisciplinary research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Abstract The paper argues that animals are central to rural social life and a rural sociology needs to develop theorisations of the rural which incorporate this fact. It looks to environmental sociology, the sociology of the relations between ‘nature’ and ‘society’, for help in this respect, but argues that the debates (particularly the ‘realist’ versus ‘social constructionist’ debate) which have characterised recent sociology of the environment have focussed attention on the problems of conceptualising ‘nature’ at the expense of attempts to reconceptualise ‘society’. It ends by arguing that sociology needs a ‘New Societal Paradigm’ which would include at least ‘domestic’ animals within society, and recognise the social relations of inequality and hierarchy through which their life opportunities are structured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Notions of the good life are often strongly linked to rurality. Existing conceptualisations tend towards an anthropocentric and individualised approach centred on personal wealth, status and happiness. In contrast, this article reframes the good life as an interspecies endeavur, which embeds people and animals alike by recognising their interdependent relational configurations within the wider natural‐social environment. Specifically, we bring insights from the concept of buen vivir to bear on research among people who live alongside their horses in rural areas of the UK. We find that horses enhance, enable and mediate people's understanding and experience of the rural good life. In contrast to popular and scholarly conceptions that emphasise privilege and leisure, the interspecies iteration that emerges is characterised by hard work, collaboration and purposeful active learning. This has profound implications in turn for our understanding and experience of sustainability, as these interspecies relations lead participants into a more active stewardship of both the immediate and wider environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gerontological research has extensively focused on the experiences of people ageing within changing social contexts. However, accounts from the context of the European post‐socialist transformation are missing. In addition, there is a lack of theoretical understanding concerning how older people experience ageing as part of the dynamic process of rural change. In this article, we present the perspectives of older Czech rural residents on living and ageing in the changing countryside. Based on 20 qualitative interviews with older adults, we show how they interpret contemporary changes in three major areas: politics and economy, infrastructure and technology, and local population and community life. Embedded in a constructionist approach, we aim to understand how their interpretations of current changes are related to their views on the past, to their self‐positioning within current and past changes and their sense of local and social belonging. We introduce the concept of biographical contextualisation, which grasps the temporal horizon of meaning‐making with regard to contemporary changes in rural life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article investigates aspects of farmers’ wellbeing in the context of their participation in an agro‐environmental scheme (AES), the North Yorkshire Cornfield Flowers Project (CFP) in the North East of England. Recent developments in wellbeing studies have informed data collection and analysis. Ethnographic data was gathered via observation, field notes and semi‐structured interviews with farmers and non‐farmer volunteers. The article discusses how farmers’ social activity, identity, status and place belonging are enhanced through participation in CFP, and how this might promote their continued AES work. Recognising the potential for AES participation to enhance farmer's wellbeing may demonstrate added value of AES and strengthen the argument for AES funding once the UK leaves the European Union. There is currently little existing evidence in the literature to support this since with only a few exceptions, wellbeing has been characteristically neglected in rural studies research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In the shift towards the Big Society, it is widely proclaimed that citizen participation and citizens’ initiatives are indispensable to maintaining services that used to be run by local or regional governments. Despite the increased interest in citizens’ initiatives, research has scarcely debated what actually defines the success of such initiatives. Using focus group discussions, this study examined the meanings and norms collectively constructed by government officials and professionals regarding the success and failure of citizens’ initiatives in rural areas. Remarkably, we found that the professional perspective of successful citizens’ initiatives was not dominated by the achievement of actual policy targets or project goals, such as maintaining public services. Rather, an initiative was perceived as successful as long as citizens are continuously active and in charge. Arguably, this somewhat paternalistic professional view of successful citizens’ initiatives could be challenged by the volunteers in those initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article contributes to conceptualisations of the countryside as an embodied space through a reflective engagement with the use of participatory methods with the campesinas (peasant women) of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range in Colombia. The key aim of the article is to explore how the embodied everyday experiences of the field and the methodologies associated to these are marked by place. To do so, I focus on two empirical aspects of my research. Firstly, I examine how engaging with place is pivotal to understanding the countryside as a relational and embodied space. Secondly, I demonstrate how the participatory methods I engaged with can provide place‐based insights to understanding the rural as embodied. Overall, this article contributes to the literature on how researchers perform and enact rural research, while aiming to de(s)colonise knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Affective and embodied knowledges have come to exert an influence on both rural studies and ageing studies. Drawing together these two contexts and considering the accelerated demographic ageing experienced in rural areas in contrast to urban areas, this article aims to explore the affective and emotional lives of older people living in rural Scotland. This article uses non‐representational theories as a mode of thought to attend to this aim, whilst considering the application of this theoretical perspective methodologically. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article first explores the more‐than‐human nature of rural spaces that older people experience. This leads into a consideration of socialities as a contour of rural ageing and the notion of atmosphere as part of an affective and emotional element of rural living. By linking non‐representational theories with rural ageing, this article ultimately contributes to ongoing debates within rural studies on affective rural lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the effect of perceptions of rural life upon the subsequent actions of counterurbanisers and the resulting impact for rural economic development in the contrasting counties of Cornwall and Northumberland. Perceptions of a high quality of life attract migrants to remote rural areas yet these areas also have high rates of economic deprivation. In-migration can stimulate rural development but in this article we hypothesise that the effectiveness of counterurbanisers as catalysts for economic development depends upon their attitudes towards the receiving community. If rural represents a slow pace of life and a step away from the pressures of modern, urban, lifestyles, counterurbanisers are unlikely to bring the dynamism to rural communities. By contrast, counterurbanisers that understand and engage with the local community are better placed to introduce new forms of human and social capital and provide valuable connections beyond the local area. Building on more endogenous development approaches, a greater understanding of the integration and economic activity of counterurbanisers can guide rural policies and highlight the significance of external representations for peripheral rural areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the links between biosecurity policy and rural differentiation. It attempts to show how biosecurity policy has been fundamentally affected by uncertainty over the rules of the game of policy-making – what Hajer has called the ‘institutional void’. In particular, the article attempts to show how this void has created a new political space in which the traditional practices of dealing with animal disease have been challenged and reshaped. Crucial to this is a discourse of partnership that permits new actors and forms of expertise to construct different approaches to biosecurity at new spatial scales. These actions legitimate a new spatiality of disease control, thereby contributing to the differentiation of the countryside. The article uses a case-study of policy attempts to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis in England and Wales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the content and distinct characteristics of lay discourses on rurality and reflects on how these are related to hegemonic popular and academic/professional discourses on the rural. Based on three months of empirical fieldwork doing serial in-depth interviews with in-migrants from 17 households in the small town of Vadsø in Finnmark, Northern Norway, the article shows that Vadsø is constructed as an idyll with elements such as a beautiful landscape, outdoor activities, safety, an easy life and pleasant pace, similar to lay representations of the rural idyll in the UK. However, the in-migrants defy the label, ‘rural’, adding ‘urban’ elements such as a clustered settlement, café latte society, gender equality and high mobility to their constructions of Vadsø. Hence, the good life in Vadsø is constructed as a combination of rural and urban elements. This challenges the ability of central hegemonic discourses on rurality, based on an underlying rural–urban dichotomy, to make sense of everyday life in Vadsø. Thus, the article argues for the need to analyse everyday life in rural settings in terms of the social production of multiple meanings that consider rurality and urbanity as interrelated, rather than opposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Controversies over the return of large carnivores (e.g. wolves) are often interpreted as clashes between rural traditionalism and urban modernity. Rural communities, however, have never been culturally monolithic, and modernization increases their diversity. However, the popular image is one of rural communities united against vermin and urban romantics. An important reason for this is probably the successful construction of the anti-carnivore front as a last line of defence against destructive forces threatening rural life. Drawing on examples from a study in Østerdalen, Norway, the struggle against wolf protection is discussed as an instance of symbolic construction of community. Images of a threatened community are vital to the self-understanding of the wolf adversaries, but cleavages run through the alliance. Three principal groups may be identified: sheep farmers, landowners who lease hunting, and people with strong ties to traditional land use practices (primarily hunting) and a rural working-class culture. These groups have not always been allies, and conflicts of interest run through the ‘resistance front’. The task here is to identify the social forces that now bring them together, and to explain why the carnivore issue is well suited as a significant component in their symbolic construction of community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the authors deconstruct the category of rural woman in the Australian context and to show the many ways in which such women's activities and identities cross boundaries and conventional categories. The authors base their discussion on two premises which are well supported in the Australian literature on gender and rurality. The first is that the traditional construction of rural life, landscape and economic activity in Australian history, popular culture, and literature, represents a white, androceniric world view in which women have been backgrounded, rendered invisible or mythologized in stereotypical ways. The second premise is that the social structures and cultural contexts in which women live in rural and remote parts of Australia can be characterized as very patriarchal. The authors here outline the development of rural women's organizations and networks in Australia and discuss the politics of change, diversity and identity in relation to those organizations, and to the variety of positions which women adopt in relation to the family farm.

Copyright of Sociologia Ruralis is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Discusses ways in which processes of capitalist development have shaped the existence and transformation of family farm and rural life in New Zealand and Canada; Comparative analysis of the rise and decline of mutual aid farm households; Similarities between the experiences of farm households in both countries; Adoption of scientific rationality of modern farmers.