The Right to Be Rural

Karen R. Foster, Jennifer Jarman, Karen R. Foster, Jennifer Jarman

• Publisher: The University of Alberta Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781772125948
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología rural

In this collection, researchers analyze rural societies, economies, and governance in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia through the lens of rights and citizenship, across such varied domains as education, employment, and health. The provocative concept of a "right to be rural" illuminates not only the challenges faced by rural communities worldwide, but also underappreciated facets of community resilience in the face of these challenges. The book's central question—"is there a right to be rural?"—offers insights into how these communities are created, maintained, and challenged. The authors illustrate that citizenship rights have a spatial character, and that this observation is critical to studying and understanding rural life in the twenty-first century. Scholars and policymakers concerned with the health and well-being of rural communities will be interested in this book.Contributors: Ray Bollman, Clement Chipenda, Innocent Chirisa, Logan Cochrane, Pallavi Das, Laura Domingo-Peñafiel, Laura Farré-Riera, Jens Kaae Fisker, Karen R. Foster, Lesley Frank, Greg Hadley, Stacey Haugen, Jennifer Jarman, Kathleen Kevany, Eshetayehu Kinfu, Al Lauzon, Katie MacLeod, Jeofrey Matai, Ilona Matysiak, Kayla McCarney, Rachel McLay, Egon Noe, Howard Ramos, Katja Rinne-Koski, Sulevi Riukulehto, Sarah Rudrum, Ario Seto, Nuria Simo-Gil, Peggy Smith, Sara Teitelbaum, Annette Aagaard Thuesen, Tom Tom, Ashleigh Weeden, Satenia Zimmermann

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Geographies of Citizenship, Equity, Opportunity, and Choice

KAREN R. FOSTER & JENNIFER JARMAN

IS THERE A RIGHT TO BE RURAL? If there is, how might it manifest and what does it mean in the everyday lives of rural people, those who govern rural places, and those who depend on rural societies for food, recreation, access to nature, and natural resources? What are its limitations and contingencies? How is the right to be rural claimed, protected, and enforced? Conversely, if there is no right to be rural, what codified rights can be meaningfully asserted and realized in rural communities, and what ones cannot? Does living outside densely populated areas affect access to services that are supposed to be universal? If citizenship rights have a spatial character, what are the implications for the principles of equity and access that underpin most legal charters and declarations, at state and international levels? These questions, and their attendant tensions and dilemmas, offer a productive framework for studying and understanding the many demographic, social, economic, environmental, and political challenges faced by rural communities worldwide. The framework of rights, mobilized in countless other causes, also helps highlight underappreciated facets of community creativity and resilience in the face of these challenges. It might also be a foundation for strategic action to direct resources and tailor public policy to rural places.

This edited collection is meant as a first step toward a rights-based understanding of rural futures. It assesses the theories and concepts of rights and citizenship in elucidating rural challenges and identifying practical solutions and routes for advocacy. Collectively, the chapters that follow demonstrate the value of applying a rights framework to climate change, neoliberal social and economic policies, economic globalization, restructuring and de-industrialization, population aging and out-migration, food security and sovereignty, and the host of other issues dramatically changing small town and rural life. Most of these issues stem from, and exacerbate aging, shrinking, or stagnating rural populations. And, as Jarman noted a few years ago, “when jobs are simply lost, young people are the first to depart for better prospects, creating a skewed age structure with communities composed principally of old people” (2017, p. 104). In some cases, the resulting out-migration threatens the very survival of communities. This book builds from the premise that, because such challenges are altering the relationship between rural citizens and their states, it is time to analyze and articulate rural decline, survival, and sustainability using the language of rights. By “rights,” we mean to conjure up what the sociologist Margaret Somers understands as legal claims “brought to bear on a state,” which come together in the “bundle” or “package” we call “citizenship”—the “status” that confers rights on people and asks for some duties in return (Somers, 2008, p. 67). We also draw on T. H. Marshall’s tone-setting 1950 essay, in which citizenship is a status that accords equal rights as well as duties to the people who hold it, and in which rights are understood to comprise civil, political, and social rights—the latter including the right to a decent standard of living.

As one of us has written on this topic before:

Marshall and the hundreds of others who have analyzed citizenship in his wake tell us that although what it means to be a citizen has and continues to evolve, citizenship is, at its core, the relationship between people and the nation-state to which they belong, as expressed, if only partially, through the rights and duties each expects of the other. To be a citizen of a particular state is to be able to hold that state accountable, and to be held accountable by that state…There’s a degree of nuance and specificity to what we have coded into law, and what we expect of states and their citizens that is unwritten, unsaid, and mostly unexamined—until it becomes controversial, as…it does in the question of how to sustain rural communities (Foster, 2018, p. 372).

One major change in the experience and codification of citizenship, according to scholars who have studied it in the later half of the twentieth century and after, is a shift toward a more contingent and contractual citizenship and away from the automatic, universal, or equalizing one envisioned, if not realized, in Marshall’s time. Margaret Somers, for example, finds in the contemporary United States a “contractualized citizenship.” Instead of a broad set of universal entitlements or birthrights, American citizenship today is earned only by productive members of society, and productivity is defined narrowly as employment. As Somers puts it, “this is the model by which the structurally unemployed become contractual malfeasants” (2008, p. 3), “judged to have let down their end of the citizenship contract” and “deemed unworthy of the ‘earned privileges’ that comprise citizenship” (Foster, 2018, p. 373). This is not a uniquely American phenomenon. As Foster has argued before, drawing on case studies from Canada,

those who are deemed unnecessary for the operation of economy and society, possibly even a burden to it…are therefore denied, through direct and horrifying neglect, or banal, slow-moving, bureaucratic indifference, some or all of the goods and protections that other scholarship lumps under citizenship (2018, p. 373).

Importantly, for the editors and authors of this collection, this perspective on transformations in rights and citizenship illuminates structural facets of the rural experience, where in many cases, people live in rural communities because there was once waged work available to them. Marshall argued that modern citizenship flourished because it helped capital expansion—it articulated the rights and mobility that people, and capital itself, need for private property and freedom of choice in employment. In rural communities around the world, companies arrive in search of deep pools of available labour, and then abandon their workers when circumstances change. And so, processes of industrialization, deindustrialization, economic restructuring, and urbanization have occurred or are occurring on a global scale. In rural communities, shuttered mines, fallowed or converted farmland, idle mills, empty manufacturing plants, and boarded-up main streets are no accidents of culture. They are signs that companies have moved on, but people have not. Those left behind—who are asked “Why do you live here?” or “How can you live here?”—even if they are employed, are placed among the contractual malfeasants and denied the full rights of citizenship, by virtue of where they continue to live. This alone is a compelling reason to study rural life in terms of citizenship and rights. Fortunately, some other extant works on rights and rurality provide an even stronger foundation for a rights-based analysis of rural issues, and they approach the matter in a productive variety of ways.

Two of these works, which our title will call to mind for many readers, are Henri Lefebvre’s 1968 (in French) essay, La Droit de la Ville, published in English in 1996 as The Right to the City, and the geographer David Harvey’s 2008 article, “The Right to the City.” Lefebvre’s essay, embraced by activists and academics in its wake, posits the “right to the city” as a “cry and demand,” but is otherwise rather abstract about what this might mean. Subsequent scholars have attempted to flesh out the concept. In Harvey’s piece, we find the notion of a right “far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: …a right to change ourselves by changing the city” (2008, p. 23). Harvey makes the case that the right to the city—the right to change ourselves by changing it—has been denied to “us” ordinary people and is worth fighting for. This argument rests on the premise that urbanization, comprising the making and remaking of cities, has historically been a classed process, with capitalist and bourgeois interests directing where people can reasonably live, what cityscapes look like, and what activities go on in them. According to Harvey, urban infrastructure and even neighbourhood layouts and lifestyles are all but dictated by capitalist expansion, and by its particular requirement of surplus value (i.e., profit) via surplus production. Echoing our argument above, Harvey shows that people live and concentrate where workers are needed, and then infrastructure concentrates where people live. The motor of urbanization, in Harvey’s work, is revealed to be capital expansion; the motor of further urban development and change is identified as “accumulation by dispossession”—the “capture of land from low-income populations” (2008, p. 34) for the purposes of making profit, establishing and expanding industry, increasing productivity, and securing control over natural and human resources.

The right to the city, it follows, is currently “too narrowly confined, restricted in most cases to a small political and economic elite who are in a position to shape cities more and more after their own desires” (Harvey, 2008, p. 38). The only hope, according to Harvey, is in a “global struggle, predominantly with finance capital…over the accumulation by dispossession visited upon the least well-off and the developmental drive that seeks to colonize space for the affluent” (2008, p. 39).

It is easy, particularly from the interdisciplinary vantage point of rural studies, to see how a right to the rural could parallel the right to the city. Indeed, Lefebvre’s path-breaking essay mentions a “right to the countryside,” but characterizes it as a disappearing, “largely agrarian” piece of the past, the rural a place of “scarcity and penury” to be absorbed by a better city (1996, p. 150). However, importantly, Lefebvre’s formulation did not equate the city with urban space, but rather he sought to understand the city as something more like a political imaginary. This might be useful, but if we want to build the case for a right to rural life, we have to look elsewhere, too. Laura Barraclough (2013) has attempted to flesh out the idea of a right to the countryside by building on those who have taken up Lefebvre’s “slogan,” but she notes that most of the latter have, “contrary to Lefebvre’s own arguments,” asserted that the “right to the city is properly—and exclusively—applied to cities” (2013, p. 1047). In Barraclough’s brief interpretation, Lefebvre made space for rural people in his formulation of the right to the city. As she explains, “given that the lives of people in the countryside are overwhelmingly structured by decision-making in cities, rural people also have a right to the city that is not at all linked to their urban inhabitance” (2013, p. 1048). However, Barraclough asks whether there is a further, more specific right to the countryside, rather than only a right to the city that belongs to rural people, too. She proposes that a right to rural life might, for example, “more explicitly [protect] human relationships to the natural environment” (2013, p. 1049).

The chapters in this collection take up the question of the right to be rural, asking whether we can meaningfully think about rights to nature and natural resources in rural places, rural livelihoods, public services in rural and remote communities, political representation, technologies, and connectivity. The chapter authors acknowledge the gaps that exist between the citizenship rights, freedoms, and obligations enshrined in the national constitutions of their case study geographies as well as in international declarations and the realities of rural life in a diversity of places. From Nova Scotia and Newfoundland to Poland, and from northern Ontario to India, Denmark, Spain, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia, their detailed examinations of what is happening in rural communities show that rights to personal security, education, health, income, and association may only be weakly maintained in rural places with small populations, where external actors deem it too costly or inefficient to deliver a universal standard of services and amenities. Their studies assess the demonstrable impacts that weakly enforced rights frameworks have in small, peripheral communities outside urban zones, and contemplate the changes that could realize stated commitments to universal human rights and access to public services in rural communities.

The first three chapters in this volume present case studies of rural education. Across the world, education is considered a fundamental human right, and schools are viewed as sites that create citizens. But what these visions mean in practice is inconsistent. In case studies of education, the spatial character of rights and citizenship is immediately clear. Katie K. Macleod’s case study of a small rural Acadian community in Nova Scotia, Canada, in chapter 2, highlights the challenges around access to French language education, which are themselves framed by issues of rurality. For over a century, needing to work on family farms meant that many rural children were kept out of school in Pomquet, Nova Scotia. At the same time, difficulties in getting appropriately trained teachers to settle in the town have been present since the outset. One result has been a gradual loss of control to urban areas, which has in turn diminished the distinctively Acadian regional dialect of Pomquet French by emphasizing French language learning that is more generally understood at national and international levels. Interestingly, MacLeod further shows that many changes to education that are problematic at a local level have actually been driven by the needs and interests of wealthier urban children who want (or whose families want them) to become bilingual due to the advantages it brings. The chapter offers a fascinating look at how intersections of class, language, and geography shape the delivery, experience, and control of rural education in ways that may hold lessons for any dual language society.

In chapter 3, Laura Domingo-Peñafiel, Laura Farré-Riera, and Núria Simó-Gil look at rural learning contexts in relation to the learning of citizenship in three rural schools in Catalonia, Spain. They argue that their case studies demonstrate how guaranteeing more democratic, inclusive, and participatory practices in secondary schools can foster broader forms of social inclusion and social cohesion. In this chapter, Lawy and Biesta’s 2006 ideas of “citizenship-as-practice” come to the fore, in an emphasis on voluntary action and experiential learning as methods of developing youth citizenship. Domingo-Peñafiel and her co-authors show us three schools facing somewhat different challenges, and reveal different ways of “learning citizenship” by exploring tensions in the curriculum and school climate, and the influence that school governance, and in particular, participatory school culture, has on the learning and practicing of democratic habits. In their view, students who learn how to handle controversial subject matters learn how to cooperate and participate at political levels beyond the school. Human relationships and feelings of belonging are shown to be important, and accordingly, small rural schools are argued to build fruitful collaborations between families and community agents that foster democratic practices and thus develop meaningful citizenship. The implicit extension of this argument is that rural school consolidation and closure—and the practice of commuting rural students to nearby urban schools—might be damaging to the development of meaningful citizenship.

Ario Seto’s case study offers another angle on the rural school’s role in citizenship making, taking us back across the Atlantic Ocean to rural Newfoundland, Canada, in chapter 4. He explores Newfoundland’s history in order to provide the context for present-day struggles between teachers and students over what constitutes appropriate sources of authority for understanding our complex world. Drawing upon interviews with rural teachers, he documents the strategies that some teachers are using both in “hallway conversations” and the formal classroom to empower students to use and critically assess online information, and connects the challenges posed by fake news to the project—typically ascribed to teachers—of developing responsible citizens. Seto’s research highlights the added pressures on rural teachers to support students’ growth as citizens in communities where the school might be one of only very few local civic organizations and where it must compete with social media’s comparatively placeless and often sensationalized content.

In chapter 5, Gregory R. L. Hadley bridges the topic of rural education into the topic of rural livelihoods, opening a set of chapters on the latter. He starts from a problem faced by many rural schools: low enrollments and the potential of closure. This problem, common in his case study of three communities in the province of Nova Scotia, Canada, diminishes the educational opportunities for those who remain in rural areas, but it also constrains citizenship, which, to be fully exercised, requires stability and community cohesiveness. Hadley proposes that enhancing the entrepreneurial skillsets of rural youth can help improve the prospects for young people to stay in rural areas and can strengthen community ties more broadly. Refusing to cede entrepreneurialism to neoliberalism, Hadley argues that an entrepreneurial mindset, conceived as more than the rational calculations of homo economicus, can allow rural young people to react to opportunities available in rural areas and make them more resourceful, creative, agentic, and able to use social capital. Drawing on survey and interview data from a sample of Nova Scotian students in three communities, Hadley’s chapter assesses the presence of entrepreneurial knowledge, skills, and attitudes among rural high school students. The author then reflects on three themes: entrepreneurial personalities, community connections, and complicated school experiences. In doing so, Hadley identifies structural challenges faced by rural youth and recommends a better engaged pedagogy that underpins and develops a well-rounded, more-than-economic entrepreneurialism to promote rural retention and revitalization.

Pallavi V. Das moves the focus more directly toward labour, engaging intensely with David Harvey’s (2008) writing in her chapter on small-scale producers in a coastal fishing community in Chilika, India (chapter 6). Seizing specifically on the theory of capital accumulation, she notes that rural areas are important spaces for capital accumulation, as well as the homes for many people. However, rural people are losing access to many of these spaces in a process that is similar to,...