Rural Cultural Research Program

University of Wollongong,
27 August 2007, Australia

A three year (2006-2008) program of activities in rural cultural research that will include a program of workshops, symposia, masterclasses for postgraduate and ECRs and other activities over the three years. Outcomes include a substantial web-based resource data base; grant applications; and publications. The project will examine how people make sense of their lived experience and locality, and how this is shaped by and influenced by government policy and planning (eg in relation to transport, communications and consumption infrastructure; migration patterns; cultural activities, festivals and creative industries; and so on). The research will examine new, continuing (or changing) discourses of rurality, including those of
- Progress and sustainability
- Equity and access
- Community
- Rural idyll (including sea changing and tree changing)
-cosmopolitanism
-aesthetics/landscape

Such discourses are framed within wider understandings of the interconnections between rurality, suburbanism and urbanism; between localized and national ‘belonging’, citizenship and identity; and through understandings of mobility and life-course transition.

http://research.uow.edu.au/ruralresearch/