Working Group 2.1

Being in the Rural: Affordances, Affects and the ‘Nature of Rurality’

Convenors:
Dr Keith Halfacree, Swansea University, k.h.halfacree@swansea.ac.uk
Dr María Jesús Rivera Escribano, Instituto de Estudios Sociales Avanzados IESA-CSIC, Córdoba, mjrivera@iesa.csic.es

This Working Group seeks to explore some of the powers that the rural reasserts, seemingly recurringly, when it ‘bites back’ or is experienced by human beings.  It seeks to delineate some of the ‘nature of rurality’, acknowledging here the central representational link between the rural and nature.  It is inspired by at least two sets of conceptual ideas. First, the kinaesthetic action-centred theory of affordances, primarily associated with James Gibson’s environmental psychology, argues for an active moment within the otherwise commonsense passive surfaces of the environment.  It seeks to transcend the dualism that suggests that the physical environment either somehow dictates behaviour – as in environmental determinism – or is in contrast just a set of inert things.  For Gibson, the visual information that we continuously receive from the environment should not be seen as a sequence of static projections that the brain subsequently takes and processes when deciding behaviour.  Instead, this information is more creative, as meaning is to be had within the relation between the person and the environment.  These ‘meaning of things for action’ are the affordances of objects. Second, emphasis on personally mediated relations takes us to the now popular social science concept, again heavily rooted in psychology, of affect.  This refers, broadly, to the feelings, emotions and even actions brought about through engagement with the materiality of the world.  Crucially, though, as with affordances, it is important not to see any one way relation between the environment and action but as something that emerges from the embodied action.

Thinking affectively about rurality and its affordances takes one away from a discursive idealism that concentrates on the rural’s expression through representation.  Instead, it encourages us to refocus on what it is like to live or experience the rural and to take the rural’s own forces seriously; to go from viewing the rural to being-in-the-rural.  This is an area that has yet to be developed significantly, in part reflecting the predominance of representation issues within rural studies’ cultural turn to date, an anti-materialist pro-social bias, and also, of course, the understandable fear of espousing some form of environmental determinism.  However, it seems very clear to us that the sensual manifestation of the rural world, notably its sights, smells and feelings, but also its commonplace sense of the mystical and unexplained merit direct research scrutiny. Some key questions that the Working Group might seek to address, therefore, include:

• What does the rural provide in terms of affects/affordances to those encountering it through a wide range of different actions (residential migration, leisure, work, contemplation, etc.)?
• How well are the rural’s affective/affordance dimensions expressed through rural representations?
• What is the connection between these affects/affordances and the strongly (rurally) representationally spatialised idea of ‘nature’?
• More fundamentally, can we see inherently rural affects/affordances at all, or are these only contingently found in ‘rural’ places?
• To what extent are rural affects/affordances socialised beyond the individual into, for example, the institutional forms of contemporary society (migration patterns, rural governance structures, planning rationales, etc.)?