Crisis in rural life and crisis in thinking: Directions for critical research.

The contemporary crisis in agriculture and rural life has been paralleled by a crisis in critical thinking and research: analysis informed by the commitment to a more rational, democratic and egalitarian society. Political economy, the currently dominant critical paradigm, has made important contributions to the identification and analysis of the economic mechanisms through which social crisis develops. But it has by and large failed to probe both the ways in which crisis is actually experienced by people enduring it and the real possibilities for change that a crisis situation might offer. This failure stems both from the nature of the theoretical assumptions which inform political economy and the manner in which political economists deploy methods of survey research in their empirical work. Using both the resources of social theory and the results of empirical, primary research, this paper attempts to suggest new directions for critical research into rural life. It argues that this research should adopt a more explicitly hermeneutical and phenomenological focus which should put the perceptions, self-understandings and activities of rural people themselves, particularly as they strive to preserve their communities against outside forces, more fully at the centre of analysis. No longer should it be assumed that researchers and those studied must remain separate if research is to be truly scholarly and scientific. The paper addresses some possible theoretical, empirical and historical implications of this argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]