TY - JOUR
T1 - The Language of Rural
T2 - Reflections towards an inclusive rural social science
AU - Gkartzios, Menelaos
AU - Toishi, Nanami
AU - Woods, Michael
N1 - Funding Information:
This article is dedicated to the memory of Professor Philip Lowe (1950–2020), whose critical contributions laid the foundations for such explorations in rural studies. Many thanks to the extremely constructive comments by the reviewers as well as to Esther Peeren, Stephanos Cherouvis and Adrienne Attorp for their suggestions and for pointing us to a useful literature. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Trans-Atlantic Rural Research Network meeting at Cornell University (2018) and at the International Symposium on the Global Countryside in Wales (2018).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2020/8/1
Y1 - 2020/8/1
N2 - While the ‘global countryside’ advocates networked and differentiated rural realities, the platform of discussing and disseminating those is usually, and sometimes inevitably, monolingual. The language of academic research creates its own politics, exclusions and inequalities: ubiquitous and universal uses of the term ‘rural’, particularly in non-Anglophone contexts (through translation for example), mask a series of nuanced, but critical understandings which reduce the quality of debate in rural studies. Drawing on the literature around language politics, we explore interpretations of rurality in Greek and Japanese linguistic contexts and we contrast those with English. We call for more critical approaches on how rural scholars use, and translate, notions of ‘the rural’. In certain contexts, this might mean avoiding the term ‘rural’ altogether and using original and informal terms in the languages of actual fieldwork. We thus support terms that communities use to describe their own spatial identities. Such actions undermine the hegemony of Anglophone ‘rural’ research and introduce nuances that are needed in international debates – despite the challenge of explaining those in a single (in fact, any) language.
AB - While the ‘global countryside’ advocates networked and differentiated rural realities, the platform of discussing and disseminating those is usually, and sometimes inevitably, monolingual. The language of academic research creates its own politics, exclusions and inequalities: ubiquitous and universal uses of the term ‘rural’, particularly in non-Anglophone contexts (through translation for example), mask a series of nuanced, but critical understandings which reduce the quality of debate in rural studies. Drawing on the literature around language politics, we explore interpretations of rurality in Greek and Japanese linguistic contexts and we contrast those with English. We call for more critical approaches on how rural scholars use, and translate, notions of ‘the rural’. In certain contexts, this might mean avoiding the term ‘rural’ altogether and using original and informal terms in the languages of actual fieldwork. We thus support terms that communities use to describe their own spatial identities. Such actions undermine the hegemony of Anglophone ‘rural’ research and introduce nuances that are needed in international debates – despite the challenge of explaining those in a single (in fact, any) language.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85087119461&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jrurstud.2020.06.040
DO - 10.1016/j.jrurstud.2020.06.040
M3 - Article
SN - 0743-0167
VL - 78
SP - 325
EP - 332
JO - Journal of Rural Studies
JF - Journal of Rural Studies
ER -