The restructuring of social imaginations in rural geography

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This paper reviews the development of rural social geography. It argues that there has been a restructuring in the dominant social imagination expressed within rural social geography away from a ‘restricted social imagination’ which shied away from considering phenomena which were immaterial and clearly politicized. The prevalence of this social imagination within geographical studies of rural settlement, population change, access to resources and services and rural communal life is highlighted. It is argued that there have been two important directions of critique of this social geography. First, the politicization of rural social geography through Marxism is discussed with particular reference being paid to the analysis of class relations in the countryside. Second, the rise of postmodernism and the cultural turn of rural geography is discussed. Attention is drawn to the explicit politicization of this social geography and the emphasis placed within it on the immaterial. The paper outlines some of the key arguments and texts of these two lines of restructuring, and also how some earlier work trespassed beyond the dominant restrictions placed on social imaginations of the rural. The paper ends by raising the issue of whether the immaterial and the politicized have been reconciled together within the current work of rural social geographers.