Inconvenient ruralities? : The State Agricultural Farm vs. the rural

• 1989 was a turning point within the socio-economic development in the former Eastern bloc, initiating a system transformation that affected the society at large. It also contributed to the crystallization of certain cultural settings, hitherto largely illegible due to the inhibition of spatial processes encountered during Communism. In Poland, after a quarter-century of free market economy, the focus on social problems began to expand to the spatial realm as well. It became apparent that the progressive social polarization that followed was most prominent in environments striated by a particular landscape type – the former State Agricultural Farm (PGR). Departing from the idea that cultural mechanisms are capable of allowing for established conceptual frameworks to create oppression, this paper challenges the engrained tradition of using ‘rural’ as a guiding label in societal organization when seen through the prism of deprivation. Considering their otherness, PGRs, hence, require a different way of looking at the idea of “rural development”. In this presentation, we investigate the concept of rurality in the discursive tenor of policy formulation and contrast it with a richly contextualized empirical account from a PGR in central Poland. Having taken account of the residents’ everyday lives in the socio-economic, material and discursive dimensions, our findings indicate that the notion of rurality imbricates and leapfrogs meaningful territories at the local level. Our findings suggest that many PGR-related problems are ‘space-independent’ to the point of being aggravated rather than helped by current policy goals, with commonplace conceptualizations of rurality usually ending up in failure – as in the case of “inconvenient” ruralities like post-PGR estates.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Social och ekonomisk geografi -- Kulturgeografi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Social and Economic Geography -- Human Geography (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

post-socialist estates

Eastern Europe

rural development

rurality

deprivation

Human Geography

Kulturgeografi

Sociology

Sociologi

post-socialist estates

Eastern Europe

rural development

rurality

deprivation

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