ABSTRACT
This chapter indicates that a person's disability and/or gender come to act as signs for assumed characteristics and behaviours, which are then 'kept in place' in differential and unequal ways through both everyday encounters and societal structures. It suggests that approaches critically informed by science and technology studies (STS) offer a means to rethink rurality and rural studies. The chapter outlines an example of STS before going on to critically explore its value for understanding aspects of rurality through the lived experiences of impaired, gendered, and ethnic bodies as these interact with remote places. Moser's research, coming to disability from a critical STS perspective, explores how to think about intersectionality. The chapter explores how aspects of the material nature of a place, and its physical distance from others, get entangled with particular lived experiences, societal attitudes and stereotypes, and economic, social, cultural and material conditions.
