Cultural Sustainability in Rural Communities
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, offering 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, this book 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 rural cultural studies as a dynamic and integrative discipline.
Catherine Driscoll is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the University of Sydney.
Kate Darian-Smith holds joint appointments at the University of Melbourne as Professor of Australian Studies and History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies and as Professor of Cultural Heritage in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning.
David Nichols is Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne.
First published 2017
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Contents
CATHERINE DRISCOLL, KATE DARIAN-SMITH AND DAVID NICHOLS
PRUDENCE BLACK
ANDREA GORDON AND CHRIS GIBSON
KATE DARIAN-SMITH, DAVID NICHOLS AND JANE GRANT
IMELDA WHELEHAN AND BARBARA PINI
TESS LEA
KATRINA SCHLUNKE
DAVID NICHOLS, KATE BOWLES AND GORDON WAITT
ANNA HICKEY-MOODY AND JANE KENWAY
DEB ANDERSON
STEPHEN MUECKE
JENNIFER JONES
MARGARET ALSTON
CATHERINE DRISCOLL
Margaret Alston is Professor and Head of Social Work at Monash University. She is the author or editor of many books, including the ground-breaking Women on the Land: The Hidden Heart of Australia (UNSW Press, 1995) and, most recently, the edited collections Women, Political Struggles and Gender Equality in South Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and, with K.L. Whittenbury, Research, Action and Policy: Addressing the Gendered Impacts of Climate Change (Springer, 2013). She has published numerous articles on gender and rural society, social disadvantage, activism, and climate change.
Deb Anderson is a Lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University. Having worked as a journalist in Australia and abroad, her research explores the meaning of extreme weather events for ordinary people, in a period of highly politicised knowledge on climate. She recently completed an oral history collection, for Museum Victoria, on the lived experience of drought and perceptions of climate change in semi-arid inland Australia, and she has begun research into the experience of cyclones, which takes her back north to the Wet Tropics, where she grew up. Her publications on drought, rurality and climate change include articles in Rural Society and Cultural Studies Review .
Prudence Black is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She has published mainly in the areas of design, modernism, fashion and workplace culture: her publications include the monograph The Flight Attendants Shoe (NewSouth Books, 2011) and numerous essays and articles, as well as consultancies, reference works, and collaborative broadcasting. Her current major research projects focus on gender and work and on the Australian wool industry; she has also been writing on the remembrance of an Australian country-town childhood.
Kate Bowles is a Senior Lecturer in the School of the Arts, English and Media at the University of Wollongong. Her research focuses on the connections between emerging social media cultures and earlier social histories of media practice; the histories of rural cinema-going in New South Wales; cinema segregation practices; and the use of cultural mapping tools to help analyse consistencies in media experiences at specific locations over time. She is a co-editor (with Richard Maltby, Deb Verhoeven and Mike Walsh) of The New Cinema History: A Guide for Researchers (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and has published a range of articles on rurality and cinema-going in journals such as Australian Humanities Review and Media International Australia .
Kate Darian-Smith holds joint appointments at the University of Melbourne as Professor of Australian Studies and History and Chair of the History Program in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies and as Professor of Cultural Heritage in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning. Her publications include many authored, edited, and co-edited books on Australian history. She has published essays and articles on subjects ranging from agricultural shows to media history and childrens play.
Catherine Driscoll is Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research is focused in three areas: youth and girls studies; rural cultural studies; and cultural theory (with an emphasis on modernity and modernism). She is the author of four monographs most recently The Australian Country Girl: History, Image, Experience (Ashgate, 2014) and a co-editor of several collections and special issues, including (with Megan Watkins and Greg Noble) Cultural Pedagogies and Human Conduct (Routledge, 2015). She has published numerous essays and articles ranging across the above fields.