Reimagining Rural: Urbanormative Portrayals of Rural Life

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Description

Reimagining Rural: Urbanormative Portrayals of Rural Life examines the ways in which rural people and places are being portrayed by popular television, reality television, film, literature, and news media in the United States. It is also an examination of the social processes that reinforce urbanormative standards that normalize urban life and render rural life as something unusual, exotic, or deviant. This includes exploring the role of the media as agenda setting agent, informing people what and how to think about rural life. Further it includes scrutinizing the institution of formal education that promotes a homogenous urban-oriented curriculum, while in the process, marginalizing the unique characteristics of local rural communities. These contributions are some of the only studies of their kind, investigating popular cultural representations of rural life, while providing powerful evidence and unique challenges for an urban society to rethink and reimagine rural life, while confronting the many stereotypes and myths that exist.

Reviews

This book is essential reading for those seeking a richer social scientific understanding of contemporary rural life. It is destined to stimulate much thoughtful debate and it is a useful tool for those seeking to challenge hurtful stereotypes of rural people and the communities in which they live. -- Walter S. DeKeseredy, West Virginia University
At times, it seems that the image of rural is a giant contradictionit is either a safe, idyllic landscape of highly cohesive communities, or a dark place of dangerous and violent people who prey on outsides with a repertoire of sadistically inspired instruments of pain and death. Sometime those images are reinforced by social scientists who poorly frame their conceptual frameworks and shortcut their research by avoiding the complexities and nuances of the real rural. This is why Fulkerson and Thomas book is a great service to both the scholarly and journalistic communities. It debunks both the rural idyll and the rural-as-evil, and offers alternatives that are more befitting of the rural realities of America today. -- Joseph F. Donnermeyer, editor of "The Routledge International Handbook of Rural Criminology"

Author Bio

Gregory M. Fulkerson is associate professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Oneonta. Alexander R. Thomas is professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Oneonta.