ABSTRACT
The countryside is different from the city. It looks different, it functions differently, it attracts different people to live and work there, and attitudes towards rural places originate from many different starting points. Academics across a range of disciplines distinguish between urban and rural in aspects of their research, and this collection will highlight the ways that ‘rural’ is used to confer certain meanings that go far beyond generalised statistical measurement. Hodge and Monk (2004: 271) called for ‘new characterisations of rural change and disadvantage that get beyond the stylised fallacies of popular debate’, and, throughout this volume, we aim to challenge common-sense assumptions about the rural in order to inform and educate public understanding. In particular we look to place interpretations of ‘rural’ at the heart of our analysis rather than seeing it as a pre-defined category within which our research is inescapably fixed.
