If ’rural space’ is a figment of imagination then “everyday ruralities” belong to those who imagine them. Departing from the today commonly accepted notion that rurality is constructed, it is fair to assume that those ‘everyday practices’ are in fact rurality. However, pinpointing those practices to “lay rural people” overlooks that whenever we look for ‘everyday problems’ in ‘rural areas’, we will find ‘rural problems’ (cf. Law, 2004). The premise of this paper is simple: whenever ‘rural practices’ are deliberated, one important group is usually omitted: the principal constructors of rurality, or, simpler, we – geographers. Here, we are particularly concerned with geographers’ continued use of ‘rurality’ as an analytical lens despite a plethora of geographical work dismissing its usefulness. Understanding scientific progress not only as the launching of sophisticated ideas, but also seeing those ideas actually being adopted by the larger scientific community, the persistence of rurality in geographical research would suggest that progress has not been achieved. Ergo, this paper aims to address the concept of rurality by shifting attention towards the practices of geographers, whose proclivity to “[think] critically about rurality but nonetheless thinking about it” (Halfacree, 2012 [interpreting Woods, 2009]) is – we argue – synonymous with ‘everyday ruralities’. Using an STS-perspective, we outline some principal drivers that not only maintain, but also shape ‘rurality’, which then is transposed onto the ‘world out there’ to be lived, performed and embodied. In conclusion, it is primarily our everyday practices as geographers – not those of some “rural people” – that effectually determine what the nexus of rurality “is”.
Ej belagd 240701