front cover of Village Housing
Village Housing
Constraints and Opportunities in Rural England
Nick Gallent, Iqbal Hamiduddin, Phoebe Stirling, and Meiling Wu
University College London, 2022
An examination of housing access and affordability barriers in rural England.

Village Housing explores the housing challenges faced by England’s amenity villages, rooted in post-war counter-urbanization and a rising tide of investment demand for rural homes. It tracks solutions to date and considers what further actions might be taken to increase the equity of housing outcomes and thereby support rural economies and alternate rural futures. The authors examine first the interwar reliance on landowners to provide tied housing and post-war diversification of responses to rising housing access difficulties, including from the public and third sectors; second, recent community-led responses; and third, actions that disrupt established production processes: self-build, low impact development, and a re-emergence of council provision. These responses to the village housing challenges are set against a broader backdrop of structural constraints and opportunities to reduce those constraints through planning, land, and tax reforms that can broaden the social inclusivity and diversity of villages and support their economic well-being.
 
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Village Ties
Women, NGOs, and Informal Institutions in Rural Bangladesh
Nayma Qayum
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Across the global South, poor women’s lives are embedded in their social relationships and governed not just by formal institutions – rules that exist on paper – but by informal norms and practices. Village Ties takes the reader to Bangladesh, a country that has risen from the ashes of war, natural disaster, and decades of resource drain to become a development miracle. The book argues that grassroots women’s mobilization programs can empower women to challenge informal institutions when such programs are anti-oppression, deliberative, and embedded in their communities. Qayum dives into the work of Polli Shomaj (PS), a program of the development organization BRAC to show how the women of PS negotiate with state and society to alter the rules of the game, changing how poor people access resources including safety nets, the law, and governing spaces. These women create a complex and rapidly transforming world where multiple overlapping institutions exist – formal and informal, old and new, desirable and undesirable. In actively challenging power structures around them, these women defy stereotypes of poor Muslim women as backward, subservient, oppressed, and in need of saving.
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Violence in Rural South Africa, 1880–1963
Sean Redding
University of Wisconsin Press, 2023
Violence was endemic to rural South African society from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. But acts of violence were not inherent in African culture; rather, violence resulted from the ways in which Africans navigated the hazardous social and political landscape imposed by white rule. Focusing on the Eastern Cape province, Sean Redding investigates the rise of large-scale lethal fights among men, increasingly coercive abduction marriages, violent acts resulting from domestic troubles and witchcraft accusations within families and communities, and political violence against state policies and officials. 

Many violent acts attempted to reestablish and reinforce a moral, social, and political order among Africans. However, what constituted a moral order changed as white governance became more intrusive, land became scarcer, and people reconstructed their notions of “traditional” culture. State policies became obstacles around which Africans had to navigate by invoking the idea of tradition, using the state’s court system, alleging the use of witchcraft, or engaging in violent threats and acts. Redding’s use of multiple court cases and documents to discuss several types of violence provides a richer context for the scholarly conversation about the legitimation of violence in traditions, family life, and political protest.
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Visibility Interrupted
Rural Queer Life and the Politics of Unbecoming
Carly Thomsen
University of Minnesota Press, 2021

A questioning of the belief in the power of LGBTQ visibility through the lives of queer women in the rural Midwest

Today most LGBTQ rights supporters take for granted the virtue of being “out, loud, and proud.” Most also assume that it would be terrible to be LGBTQ in a rural place. By considering moments in which queerness and rurality come into contact, Visibility Interrupted argues that both positions are wrong. In the first monograph on LGBTQ women in the rural Midwest, Carly Thomsen deconstructs the image of the rural as a flat, homogenous, and anachronistic place where LGBTQ people necessarily suffer. And she suggests that visibility is not liberation and will not lead to liberation. 

Far from being an unambiguous good, argues Thomsen, visibility politics can, in fact, preclude collective action. They also advance metronormativity, postraciality, and capitalism. To make these interventions, Thomsen develops the theory of unbecoming: interrogating the relationship between that which we celebrate and that which we find disdainful—the past, the rural, politics—is crucial for developing alternative subjectivities and politics. Unbecoming precedes becoming. Drawing from critical race studies, disability studies, and queer Marxism, in addition to feminist and queer studies, the insights of this book will be useful to scholars theorizing issues far beyond sexuality and place and to social justice activists who want to move beyond visibility. 

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front cover of Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods
Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods
Mandrona, April R.
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods brings together visual studies and childhood studies to explore images of childhood in the study of rurality and rural life. The volume highlights how the voices of children themselves remain central to investigations of rural childhoods. Contributions look at representations and experiences of rural childhoods from both the Global North and Global South (including U.S., Canada, Haiti, India, Sweden, Slovenia, South Africa, Russia, Timor-Leste, and Colombia) and consider visuals ranging from picture books to cell phone video to television. 
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The Voice of the Rural
Music, Poetry, and Masculinity among Migrant Moroccan Men in Umbria
Alessandra Ciucci
University of Chicago Press, 2022
A moving portrait of the contemporary experiences of migrant Moroccan men.

Umbria is known to most Americans for its picturesque rolling hills and medieval villages, but to the many migrant Moroccan men who travel there, Umbria is better known for the tobacco fields, construction sites, small industries, and the outdoor weekly markets where they work. Marginalized and far from their homes, these men turn to Moroccan traditions of music and poetry that evoke the countryside they have left— l-‘arubiya, or the rural. In this book, Alessandra Ciucci takes us inside the lives of Moroccan workers, unpacking the way they share a particular musical style of the rural to create a sense of home and belonging in a foreign and inhospitable nation. Along the way, she uncovers how this culture of belonging is not just the product of the struggles of migration, but also tied to the reclamation of a noble and virtuous masculine identity that is inaccessible to Moroccan migrants in Italy.
 
The Voice of the Rural allows us to understand the contemporary experiences of migrant Moroccan men by examining their imagined relationship to the rural through sound, shedding new light on the urgent issues of migration and belonging.  
 
 
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Voices from the Heart of the Land
Rural Stories that Inspire Community
Richard L. Cates Jr.
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
From 2001 to 2006, Richard L. Cates Jr. interviewed senior members of more than 30 families living in and around Arena township, a small community in southern Wisconsin. He asked them about growing up in rural America and their connection to a way of life that is vanishing in the twenty-first century.
The result, Voices from the Heart of the Land, is a collection of reminiscences, observations, and opinions celebrating the stewardship of the land and the values of the stewards. Of course, as Cates points out, these are nothing less than “our core human values—integrity, commitment, responsibility, citizenship, self-determination, decency, kindness, love, and hope.”
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Voices Worth the Listening
Three Women of Appalachia
Thomas G Burton
University of Tennessee Press, 2020
While Appalachian stereotypes and often misplaced debates about essentialism in Appalachian character still cloud our understanding of the people of the region—especially in the wake of J. D. Vance’s bestselling Hillbilly Elegy—the words of people who live in the region tell a far more complex story of diversity, hard times, perseverance, and unique experiences. Based on recorded interviews with three different women in different areas of Appalachia, Voices Worth the Listening is a carefully crafted oral history work that faithfully represents these women’s lives using their own words. 

A powerful counter-narrative to the current conversation, Voices Worth the Listening presents three real stories of Appalachian people that are unvarnished and more than simply anecdotal. Race, class, drug culture, education, and socioeconomic mobility are all addressed in some way by these narratives. While the themes that emerge in these stories are by no means unique to Appalachia—indeed, they resonate in some ways with the experiences of disadvantaged and marginalized people in other regions of the country—these three women have lived much of their lives outside of the mainstream and their narrated experiences become a meaningful signpost for the people of Appalachia.
 
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