Rural Voices Research Articles

Introduction: Rural Voices

Introduction: Rural Voices

Moving towards social inclusion: Engaging rural voices in priority setting for health.

Achieving universal health coverage (UHC) in the context of limited resources will require prioritising the most vulnerable and ensuring health policies and services are responsive to their needs. One way of addressing this is through the engagement of marginalised voices in the priority setting process. Public engagement approaches that enable group level deliberation as well as individual level preference capturing might be valuable in this regard, but there are limited examples of their practical application, and gaps in understanding their outcomes, especially with rural populations. To address this gap, we implemented a modified priority setting tool (Choosing All Together-CHAT) that enables individuals and groups to make trade-offs to demonstrate the type of health services packages that may be acceptable to a rural population. The paper presents the findings from the individual choices as compared to the group choices, as well as the differences among the individual choices using this tool. Participants worked in groups and as individuals to allocate stickers representing the available budget to different health topics and interventions using the CHAT tool. The allocations were recorded at each stage of the study. We calculated the median and interquartile range across study participants for the topic totals. To examine differences in individual choices, we performed Wilcoxon rank sum tests. The results show that individual interests were mostly aligned with societal ones, and there were no statistically significant differences between the individual and group choices. However, there were some statistically significant differences between individual priorities based on demographic characteristics like age. The study demonstrates that giving individuals greater control and agency in designing health services packages can increase their participation in the priority setting process, align individual and community priorities, and potentially enhance the legitimacy and acceptability of priority setting. Methods that enable group level deliberation and individual level priority setting may be necessary to reconcile plurality. The paper also highlights the importance of capturing the details of public engagement processes and transparently reporting on these details to ensure valuable outcomes. The facilitator of the CHAT groups was a member from the community and underwent training from the research team. The fieldworkers were also from the community and were trained and paid to capture the data. The participants were all members of the rural community- the study represents their priorities.

Unravelling the Norwegian meat reduction controversy: navigating contested sustainabilities and the role of meat

Controversy surrounds research reports that promote reduced meat consumption in Norway. By studying these controversies in the media, we ask why meat reduction is polarised seemingly between environmental and agricultural, urban and rural voices. We show how a ‘conventional’ definition of meat reduction in a self-regulating market tends to disconnect consumption habits from agricultural policies. The result is a paradox: Norwegians are urged to eat less meat, but farmers must produce more to stay afloat. In this conventional frame, meat reduction is seen by rural and farmer voices as a further exaggeration of agricultural decline, depopulation and centralisation. To unravel this controversy, we contrast this with a critical ‘post-productivist’ view of conventional agriculture and volume-centred farm subsidies since the 1950s. We show how a different, more interactive understanding of consumption as interrelated with Norwegian food policies, production and distribution emerges, highlighting a path through the controversy. By reimagining a change from subsidies for production volume to production methods, climate, health, environmental and rural issues are brought into conversation with each other. While largely remaining a marginal voice in a heavily polarised debate, we show how alternative notions of meat reduction can help us move past meat reduction controversies. The article stresses that the two concepts of meat reduction are characterised by distinct notions of consumption, suggesting that the popular understanding of what consumption is can be a barrier to, or a part of, a meat-reduced future.

Geographical articulations of rurality at the rural‐urban interface

AbstractResearch on the intermediate space or interface where rural and urban boundaries become blurred has been gaining momentum within geography and other intersecting fields. In contrast to the dominant focus on the growth of urbanism at the rural‐urban interface, a growing number of studies have emerged to intervene the debate from the rural side. This paper contributes to this burgeoning scholarship by reviewing recent work on geographical articulations of rurality in the face of urbanizing forces and processes operating in intermediate spaces. I firstly explore how extant representations of rurality at the rural‐urban interface are inherent with an “idyllic” vision, a “modernist” one or a combination of both, and how the interactions among multiple rural visions produce tensions and conflicts at the interface. Then, I outline the recent conceptualizations of rurality under the relational and materialist turns, which move beyond the discursive construction of the countryside and offer new theoretical insights and analytical concepts for appreciating multiple, heterogeneous, open and inclusive articulations of rural voices at the interface. Finally, I map out directions for future research to attend to the insufficiently‐addressed temporal dimensions of the rural‐urban interface, thereby moving current discussions of relational rurality forward.

Articulating relational rurality amidst urbanization: Agency, spatial paradox and the de/reterritorialization of lineage landscapes in contemporary rural China

AbstractThis paper seeks to offer a nuanced understanding of how the rural responds to and speaks back to the urban in the context of increasingly blurred rural‐urban landscapes. The prevailing theorizations remain entrenched in an intellectual impasse that still treats the rural as a residual space or a reactive actor besieged by external urban forces. Using lineage spaces as an empirical lens, this paper delves into rural geographies of lineage landscapes in post‐reform China by articulating rural agencies in more active, non‐lineal ways. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in rural Wenzhou, southeast China, this paper argues that the articulation of rural voices amidst China's urban modernity unveils a spatial paradox of landscape de/reterritorialization at the dimensions of discourse, practice and (trans)locality. We first reveal how official rural discourses de‐territorialize and lessen lineage groups' control over their symbolic buildings while simultaneously opening up opportunities for them to mobilize officially‐sanctioned discourses to expand lineage spaces and reterritorialize their power. Second, we show how villagers embrace the de‐territorializing practice of landscape commodification, which becomes a crucial source of finance for them to perform ritual activities at specific festivals, thereby re‐asserting rural collectivism, sociality and sacredness. Third, we unpack the trans‐local dimension of rural de/reterritorialization by exploring how villagers forge lineage‐based rural networking that transcends space‐time, which paradoxically reinforces the spatial claim for territorializing rural power that is demarcated from urban/modern orientations. We further argue that these multiple spatial processes of rural de/reterritorialization challenge a reactive or neatly‐divided account of rural agency during its engagement with urbanizing relations and processes. In all, this paper offers a more complex, paradoxical account of relational rurality in a rapidly urbanizing China, and foregrounds an agenda towards more ‘inclusive’ rural studies.

Investigating concentrated exclusion in telecommunications development: Engaging rural voices from Northern Canada

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, access to adequate, affordable, reliable broadband has become essential to many aspects of modern life. However, while urban centers in Canada already benefit from high-speed broadband services, many rural/remote and Northern communities face increasingly concentrated spaces of exclusion associated with digital divides. Inequalities in broadband services in Northern Canada have long been recognized by the federal government, which has initiated policies, regulations and funding programs to support the deployment of better connectivity infrastructure and services. Historically, many of these initiatives reflect a top-down approach that fails to consider the diversity of the communities and regions they are designed to support. Here, we focus on a case study of a policy consultation held by the national telecommunications regulator in an effort to learn current issues and challenges in the North. Consistent with existing research, our findings revealed that the most frequently reported challenges are the high cost of access, slow speeds, and limited competition. We also point out fewer submissions from smaller rural communities and argue that policymakers and researchers should pay closer attention to place-based challenges identified in different types of communities, and adopt more precise engagement tools and processes to encourage input from community members.

It's not one size fits all: a case for how equity-based knowledge translation can support rural and remote communities to optimize virtual health care.

People living in rural and remote British Columbia (BC) in Canada experience complex barriers to care, resulting in poorer health outcomes compared to their urban counterparts. Virtual healthcare (VH) can act as a tool to address some of the care barriers, including reducing travel time, cost, and disruptions to people's lives. Conversely, VH can exacerbate inequities through unique difficulties in rural implementation, such as a lack of access to necessary infrastructure (eg internet), social supports, and technological capacity (eg devices and literacy). The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic induced a rapid shift to VH, providing new opportunities for health care while simultaneously highlighting and exacerbating inequities for people living in rural and remote settings. Equity-informed knowledge translation processes can help address these concerns. This commentary reports on an equity-informed knowledge translation process engaged by a diverse group of health researchers, community members, and practitioners in BC. Informed by equity principles from the Canadian Coalition for Global Health Research, this knowledge exchange and translation process led to the co-creation of two practical tools: a set of VH appointment tip sheets and an open access report. Through stakeholder engagement and literature consultation, VH appointments were found to have many benefits for those in rural and remote communities, including expanding access to basic and specialized health services. However, some hesitation was noted when relying solely on these modes of care, as they can lack relationality, clarity, and time to process medical information. The tip sheets resulting from this process are an interactional-level tool developed to address this concern and optimize VH appointments, for rural patients and care providers. They offer the respective stakeholder group insights on how to actively prepare for and participate in inclusive virtual care. On a systems level, there is a continually echoed need for equity-based processes to ensure that VH is striking the balance of meeting rural health needs without exacerbating inequities. Additionally, incorporating the voices of rural and remote community members is essential. To help address this gap, an open-access report was compiled to serve as a small-scale example of integrating rural voices with existing literature to recommend systems-level adjustments. Overall, VH holds promise as an effective tool for addressing inequities experienced by those living in rural areas. To maximize this potential, rural and remote stakeholders must be proactively engaged and listened to throughout the processes of considering, planning, and implementing shifts in the utilization of VH options.

Comunicar as alterações climáticas e a energia na África rural: Análise de um caso para explicar como a comunicação participativa pode apoiar a transição para as energias renováveis e a adoção de tecnologias solares na África rural

Over the last two decades, numerous initiatives have attempted to solve the problem of ac-cess to electricity in Africa by massively deploying renewable solar solutions to rural areas. In doing so, they are helping to redress the problem, yet struggling to convince rural stake-holders to accept and integrate solar systems. This article explores how energy initiatives can strategically employ communication models to ease transition, acceptance, and integra-tion of renewable energy in rural Africa. Qualitative and quantitative research methods and tools such as surveys, in-depth interviews, and field observation, were used. These were col-lected and feedback analyzed from rural stakeholders on how communication shaped their understanding, acceptance, and integration of renewable solar energy in their local area. The results showed that the attitudes rural stakeholders generally show towards renewa-ble solar technologies depend on the communication approach used to engage them. The results also revealed a range of symbiotic factors that can change public perception and ac-ceptance of solar energy. One of them is including rural voices in the process of developing and delivering communication. The research results demonstrate that public engagement in energy initiatives is a very important way of encouraging acceptance. The results recom-mend energy communication scholarship use inclusive methods to try to understand what makes rural stakeholders shift their attitudes and beliefs. Finally, it is argued that grassroots innovations and community led renewable approaches are socially acceptable and inclusive and development projects and initiatives need to find better ways to offer rural stakeholders the ability to shape their own communications.

Engaging Transformation: Using Seasonal Rounds to Anticipate Climate Change

Seasonal rounds are deliberative articulations of a community’s sociocultural relations with their ecological system. The process of visualizing seasonal rounds informs transdisciplinary research. We present a methodological approach for communities of enquiry to engage communities of practice through context-specific sociocultural and ecological relations driven by seasonal change. We first discuss historical précis of the concept of seasonal rounds that we apply to assess the spatial and temporal communal migrations and then describe current international research among Indigenous and rural communities in North America and Central Asia by the creation of a common vocabulary through mutual respect for multiple ways of knowing, validation of co-generated knowledge, and insights into seasonal change. By investigating the relationship between specific biophysical indicators and livelihoods of local communities, we demonstrate that seasonal rounds are an inclusive and participatory methodology that brings together diverse Indigenous and rural voices to anticipate anthropogenic climate change.

Impact of COVID-19 on music venues in regional South Australia

As spaces of social, cultural and economic production, small regional music venues are an under-explored research area that can offer insights into changing music and performance practices, place-making, and the connections between urban and regional communities. Within the context of the COVID-19 crisis, the state of precarity in which such venues operate is emphasized and exacerbated. This article will present preliminary findings from our case study of a small, regional music venue in the mid-north of South Australia that has been heavily affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated government restrictions. The pandemic has dramatically changed the way that live music is both performed and experienced, and a case study such as this offers an opportunity to discuss its impact on niche cultural and community spaces that are geographically and socially removed from the urban milieu and its policy settings. Preliminary findings suggest COVID-19 brought about both challenges (capacity restrictions and disruption of interstate travel for audiences and artists) as well as opportunities (strengthening the presence of rural voices in policy settings). The case study also highlights the need for further research on strategies for developing and sustaining regional touring pathways throughout South Australia.

Rural Voices on Quality of Service Delivery in Community-Based Health Planning and Services in the Wassa-Amenfi West District, Ghana

The study sought to establish respondents’ views on the attitude of health care providers, perceptions of the quality of medical services provided and indications on the future use of CHPS compound in the Wassa-Amenfi West District. The study employed the cross-sectional survey design within the quantitative research paradigm. Questionnaire was administered to one hundred and fifty community members and analysis was done through frequencies and percentages. The study concluded that respondents had positive views on the attitude of health service providers in the CHPS compound. They were also satisfied with the quality of service delivery at the CHPS compound. Respondents were willing to visit and recommend family members and friends to the facility in the future to access healthcare. It was therefore recommended that medicines and health information should be made available at the compound to enhance quality health delivery at the grass root.

Rural Voices on Quality of Service Delivery in Community-Based Health Planning and Services in the Wassa-Amenfi West District, Ghana

The study sought to establish respondents’ views on the attitude of health care providers, perceptions of the quality of medical services provided and indications on the future use of CHPS compound in the Wassa-Amenfi West District. The study employed the cross-sectional survey design within the quantitative research paradigm. Questionnaire was administered to one hundred and fifty community members and analysis was done through frequencies and percentages. The study concluded that respondents had positive views on the attitude of health service providers in the CHPS compound. They were also satisfied with the quality of service delivery at the CHPS compound. Respondents were willing to visit and recommend family members and friends to the facility in the future to access healthcare. It was therefore recommended that medicines and health information should be made available at the compound to enhance quality health delivery at the grass root.

Rural voices: A social-ecological perspective on factors influencing youth substance use in rural South africa.

Youth can be a positive force for development when provided with the knowledge and opportunities they need to thrive, yet they continue to experience insurmountable challenges, such as poverty and absentee fathers, that prompt them to resort to risk behaviours such as substance use. In rural South Africa, women tend to be the breadwinners and more involved with parenting than men. The primary objective of the study was to explore perspectives of rural youth on factors influencing youth participation in substance use. The secondary objective was to obtain the perspectives of adult women on factors influencing substance use among young people. The qualitative study, informed by a social-ecological framework, utilised a semi-structured interview protocol in focus group discussions in rural South Africa. Seven focus group discussions, each with between 8 and 15 individuals were conducted with 79 youth. The eighth discussion was with nine adult women. Data were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim, manually coded and further analysed into themes using NVivo 12. Four themes emerged: hopelessness and lack of motivation, lack of adult role models such as father, lack of built environment for recreational activities and lack of educational opportunities. The social-ecological model provided a useful framework to understand the findings. In line with this model, rural youth in South Africa described a variety of factors that influenced youth substance use and other risk behaviours. These related to the individual, relationships with others, community and societal norms and values factors of the social-ecological model. The broadening spectrum of substances available to an increasing youth population bulge in Africa suggests a strong threat of social and disease burden due to substance use disorders. Given this threat, this study provides awareness to a multi-systems approach needed to support the rural South African youth.

Rural Voices: 15 Authors Challenge Assumptions about Small-Town America ed. by Nora Shalaway Carpenter

Reviewed by: Rural Voices: 15 Authors Challenge Assumptions about Small-Town America ed. by Nora Shalaway Carpenter Elizabeth Bush Carpenter, Nora Shalaway, ed. Rural Voices: 15 Authors Challenge Assumptions about Small-Town America. Candlewick, 2020 [336p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781536212105 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781536216110 $18.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 7-12 If you live in a burg with fewer than ten thousand residents that is “significant driving distance” from an urban center, you’re small-town—at least within the scope of this collection of short stories, poems, memoirs, and graphic works by authors who’ve lived the life. That covers a lot of ground in America, as the collection spans the continent from Alaska to Georgia, with plenty of stops across the heartland. A generous handful of the tales offer particularly rich storytelling—S. A. Cosby’s story of a fraught encounter between a wealthy Black entrepreneur and his blue collar Black employee over a missing watch; Ashley Hope Pérez’s poem in which stealthy references to sexual abuse are tucked among verses extolling the beauty and camaraderie of rural life; and stories by Rob Costello and Nasugraq Rainey Hopson in which teens in the Catskills and in Alaska confront specters from respective local lore. While stories rife with details about overheated engines and weak broadband internet service, of segregation and wringer washers and outhouses, and of marginalized groups facing bigotry may suggest a monolithic reality that the editor is explicitly hoping to dispel, readers who are honest enough to recognize that these themes are not confined to rural areas may realize from these stories that the line between urban and rural living is not sharply defined. Bios and comments by contributors are appended. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Future of Our Histories: Young Rural Voices from Dullstroom-Emnotweni

This article reports on three sets of interviews conducted with children and young people living in Dullstroom-Emnotweni on the Mpumalanga Highveld in eastern South Africa. Firstly, 50 learners between the ages of 10 and 14 were interviewed on their dreams for the future. Later that year, in 2011, a total of 60 young people who were still unemployed ten or more years after having finished school were interviewed on what was left of their dreams. Five years later, in 2016, a third group of young people between the ages of 18 and 24 were interviewed in order to establish whether the situation of marginalised young people in rural South Africa had changed. The primary school learners expressed their career hopes in terms of the needs of their marginalised society, that is, to become nurses, teachers and social workers. The first group of young people interviewed in 2011 blamed their shattered dreams on the unavailability of tertiary education and the reality of HIV infection. The second group, interviewed in 2016, quite similarly, expressed their concerns as a lack of job and educational opportunities, a lack of agency and choice, a lack of respect from society and decision makers, and an inability to escape from drugs and unhealthy sex.

Rural voices and protected areas: the environmental perception of small rural owners about the natural resources

Perceptions on the environment provided by the Oral History approach enabledan understanding of the historical and social-ecological context regarding natural resources on the part of residents neighboring on a Conservation Unit (CU), in the NationalForest of Ritápolis, Minas Gerais State, Brazil.The resident’s lack of engagement with the management of the CU is a reflexion of an environmental policy based on traditional conservationist practices which leads to a non-identification of the residents with the protected area, resulting in negative perceptions about the role of CU and its administration. This situation culminates in a conflict based on different concepts of territoriality.

Writing Suburban Citizenship: Place-Conscious Education and the Conundrum of Suburbia

Writing Suburban Citizenship:Place-Conscious Education and the Conundrum of Suburbia Rosanne Carlo Robert E. Brooke (Ed.) Syracuse UP, 2015, 266 pp. Robert E. Brooke and his college and high school colleagues demonstrate the innovative, place-conscious pedagogies being practiced out of the National Writing Project (NWP) sites in Nebraska in the latest edited collection, Writing Suburban Citizenship: Place-Conscious Education and the Conundrum of Suburbia. The introduction of the book, written by Brooke, makes an impassioned case that suburbs—often overlooked by academics in literacy and writing studies, as well as critiqued for encouraging a lifestyle that is segregationist, ahistorical, and unsustainable—are indeed the communities where an active citizenry desperately needs to be nurtured (13). As of the 2010 census, the opening claims, suburbs are where most American youth live and are educated, and, as the 2016 election showed us, where people vote (2). Urban dwellers, and I would include myself as a New Yorker in this distinction, often too easily dismiss suburbia through pronunciations like, "all the houses are 'made of ticky-tacky' and the roads are lined with strips of chain stores and chain restaurants." Brooke and the other contributors of the collection, however, are working against these stereotypes, making visible to readers (particularly other suburban educators) that suburban dwelling places have environmental, cultural, and historical concerns. These can and should be emphasized in the public-school curriculum in order to reveal to teachers and students meaningful connections between place, identity development, and political activity. What is so impressive about this book, like its predecessor Rural Voices: Place-Conscious Education and The Teaching of Writing, is the way it fosters a critical dialogue between high school and college teachers. The chapters serve as case studies for approaches to place-based curriculums and are written in an accessible style; the book would be useful, for example, in a course preparing and credentialing future teachers. The book well mirrors the National Writing Project's motto of "Teachers Teaching Teachers." In today's public schools, maintaining this NWP stance is vital to authorize teachers as sound experts who can and should make decisions for the education of the nation's children instead of allowing these decisions to be made by [End Page 116] textbook producers, state legislators, or the Secretary of Education. The book also puts forward the idea that place-conscious curriculums cultivate in teachers and students a sense of "belonging" that allow them to see the "'heritage, values, and history' that have brought [their] community into being;" Brooke and his colleagues believe that this sense of belonging creates a commitment to place through "a vision for its future, for a healthy sense of what the community can become" (27). In the introduction, Brooke describes how the book is structured into two parts, grouping together author contributions that speak to the ecological (part 1) and cultural (part 2) concerns around place. Drawing upon the work of writer, farmer, and environmental activist Wendell Berry, Brooke frames for the reader how places are a "mutually interdependent system of relations" (29). These systems can further be defined as natural (watershed) and man-made (commonwealth): the watershed is "an ecological entity: a network of mutually interdependent natural systems that work together around a particular river system" and the commonwealth is "a cultural entity: a network of mutually interdependent cultural systems that work together within a particular political entity" (28). For the sake of the structure of the book, this sequencing works well. However, as many contemporary scholars in ecocomposition studies have pointed out, the environmental and the cultural are not easily separated as they are part of a complex ecology through which they always work together. In other words, there are no "natural" spaces without human influence. The book's separation of environment and culture perpetuates a binary, one that could have been unpacked more through the opening chapter of the book. The first four contributors in Part One, ecological, bring to the forefront issues about water and its scarcity, climate control, and the development of community around local natural resources. Each contributor uniquely discusses the idea of making visible connections between communities and their environment. Susan Martens in "Move the Writer...

Emerging Voices: Talking over the Fence: Writing in Turn-of-the-Century Farm Journals

This article investigates turn-of-the-century agricultural journals as mediums of composition education that taught readers the discoursal goals and values of the agricultural press. Editors of Maine Farmer and Ohio Farmer, in particular, argued that advanced composition skills needed to be connected to rural contexts and practices. They also ultimately offered readers an identity to assume as writers: teachers in a community of farming professionals. That these publications were critical of the pedagogies that did not empower rural voices, and were simultaneously so intent on sponsoring new rural writers, demonstrates that more current concerns with rural literacy have a long history.

The urban-rural dichotomy in the Indonesian documentaries Nona nyonya? and Untuk apa?

The media play a pivotal role in the democratization process in Indonesia and this is among others apparent in the surge of films, both fiction and documentaries that have been produced after the end Suharto’s decades of control over the media. It is important to note, however, that compared with fiction films, the documentary genre remains rather unpopular in Indonesia. Indonesian documentary films struggle to depict stories of the subaltern and those living in the “periphery” in order for them to be seen and heard by the greater masses and by those in power – the ones in the “centre” or Jakarta. This paper discusses the connection between urban and rural voices and its impact in the documentary films Nona nyonya? (Miss mrs?, 2008) and Untuk apa? (What’s the point?, 2008) produced by Kalyana Shira Films, an organization well-known for its work on gender issues using film as medium. Departing from the notion that the film industry itself is still largely Jakarta-centred, this article focuses on the way urban settings and voices are used to create rhetoric, and the impact of the domination of these urban voices over the rural ones.

Small-Town Perspectives, Big-Time Motivation: Composing and Producing Place-Based Podcasts

In the Rural Voices project, students produce podcasts about their lives for real audiences.