Call for Abstracts – The Right to Be Rural: Citizenship Outside the City
Rural communities face many demographic, social, economic, environmental and political challenges. Community resilience in the face of these challenges attracts significant attention across the contemporary world. Climate change, neoliberal social and economic policies, economic globalization, restructuring and de-industrialization, population ageing and outmigration, food security and sovereignty, and a host of other issues are dramatically changing small town and rural life, and in some cases threatening their very survival. Moreover, such challenges are already altering the relationship between rural citizens and their states. The citizenship rights, freedoms and obligations typically enshrined in national constitutions—regarding personal security, education, health, income, and association—may only be weakly maintained in rural places with small populations, where external actors deem it too costly or inefficient to deliver a universal standard of services and amenities.
The editors of this new collection, tentatively titled The Right to be Rural, wish to assemble an international group of authors to reflect on the question of rural citizenship, and to connect their empirical investigations of rural and small town life to sociological theories of citizenship and rights. The University of Alberta Press has formally expressed interest in the title, and will be the main target of the full proposal.
We invite authors to analyse rural challenges in any part of the world through the lens of citizenship. Proposed chapters must have empirical (i.e. fieldwork—interviews, surveys, ethnographic data, content analysis) and theoretical content. Final chapters must engage with relevant social theory on citizenship (reading list to be provided by the editors) and, after initial peer review, with other chapters in the same volume.
Interested authors should submit a working title and abstract of no more than 300 words, by October 30th, 2018, to Karen Foster (Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada) and Jennifer Jarman (Lakehead University, Ontario, Canada) at: Karen.foster@dal.ca and Jjarman@lakeheadu.ca
