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In this paper, we investigate how rurality is performed in online community groups, attending in particular to outdoor recreation and engagement with local nature. The starting point for our performative approach is that when places are digitally mediated, the technological intermediary is never innocent or neutral. Methodologically, we conducted an online ethnography in 20 rural community groups on Facebook during one full year, collecting every post and associated comment threads relating to outdoor recreation and other forms of engagement with local nature. An iterative, heuristic coding process was employed to engage with and further develop existing performative approaches to the sociological study of rural places. Distinguishing throughout between staged and quotidian performances, our findings detail how the routines, pleasures, and tasks of everyday rural life are performed online. Important distinctions that emerge from this include routines that are given vis‐à‐vis those that are in‐the‐making; pleasures based on impression and expression respectively; and tasks relating to carework and sharework. The paper contributes valuable new insights regarding the performance of rurality in the age of the everyday Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial justice includes the right of residents to define their own space of habitation, the places in which their everyday lives unfold. Recent scholarship has shown how this right has come under pressure in the countryside, prompting a need for research that attends in-depth do the ways in which rural dwellers exercise this aspect of spatial justice. The paper addresses this need by studying the affective relations in everyday rural life between human residents, wild and domestic animals, landscapes, and 'baroque' natures. Utilising photoethnographic fieldwork in the Danish countryside, the paper shows how animals, natures, and landscapes come to play distinctive parts in the (re)production and breaking up of the vernacular rhythms that form the stable but fluctuating and uncertain backbone of everyday life in the countryside. The practices expressed through these rhythms represent important local ways of knowing the rural as a space of habitation, but their vague, diffuse, and ephemeral nature make them difficult to translate into policy and planning. The genuine attempt to do so, however, remains indispensable to the pursuit of spatial justice, because it may be the only way to ensure that such efforts do not become counterproductive by unwittingly reproducing hegemonic ideas about what certain places are and ought to be. On the part of researchers, this requires an insistence on the necessary contingency of rurality, while on the part of planners and policy-makers it requires awareness of the necessarily imperfect, partial, and crude nature of available knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]