Cultural Sustainability in Rural Communities: Rethinking Australian Country Towns

ISBN-13: 9781472468642 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 240 str.

Catherine Driscoll; Kate Darian-Smith

Opis

There has been a recent expansion of interest in cultural approaches to rural communities and to the economic and social situation of rurality more broadly. This interest has been particularly prominent in Australia in recent years, spurring the emergence of an interdisciplinary field called -rural cultural studies-. This collection is framed by a large interdisciplinary research project that is part of that emergence, particularly focused on what the idea of -cultural sustainability- might mean for understanding experiences of growth, decline, change and heritage in small Australian country towns. However, it extends beyond the initial parameters of that research, bringing together a range of senior and emerging Australian researchers who offer diverse approaches to rural culture. The essays collected here explore the diverse forms that rural cultural studies might take and how these intersect with other disciplinary approaches. It offers a uniquely diverse but also careful account of life in country Australia, yet in its emphasis on the simultaneous specificity and cross-cultural recognisability of rural communities it also outlines a field of inquiry and a set of critical strategies that are more broadly applicable to thinking about the -rural- in the early twenty-first century. This book will be valuable reading for students and academics of Geography, History, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Anthropology and Sociology, introducing a new dynamic, integrative discipline of rural cultural studies.