Ordinary subjects which in their ordinariness are extraordinarily representative.

2018

My chapter in Rurality Re-Imagined started life as presentation given at The Science Museum for an event: Towards a Museum of Contemporary Farming led by artist Georgina Barney. I was invited to propose something for inclusion into this fictional museum.

The book features 24 artists, designers and academics who engage with particular rural places, processes and experiences – questioning the conceptual apparatus through which the rural is represented. In doing so, they reveal a countryside that is multifaceted, mutable and replete with possibilities.

The writers, designers and artists assembled in Rurality Re-imagined ask us to take seriously the neglected countryside, but not to simply assume that neglect and re-present familiar ideas and ideals of the rural as local in opposition to the urban as global. Through collectively reflecting on their own imaginings, experiences and thinking about rurality, and with a suitably diverse set of case studies, the contributors truly open up rural space for readers. It is a landmark publication in an emerging ‘new rural studies’ no longer either romanticized as idyll or written off as backwater, the rural here truly is reimagined in the age of the global village. David Bell.

Download PDF

Rurality Re-Imagined. Villagers, Farmers, Wanderers, Wild Things
Published by Applied Research and Design Publishing.
An imprint of ORO Editions
Edited by Dr Ben Stringer and Clare Hamman
Design by Clare Hamman
ISBN978-1-940743-34-9

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