Critical, Symbolic and Emotional Rural Geographies

Module code: GY3417

You'll explore how people imagine or symbolise rural spaces, how the lives of people living and working in the countryside are conditioned by relations of power, and how people connect emotionally and experientially with the material and living constituents of the countryside. 

The module expands on issues of social and cultural geography explored in year 2, exploring them within the context of places that are viewed and understood as being rural in character. The module includes a field trip where students engage with people from a local rural community. Themes explored within the module currently include:

• Understandings of rurality and rural geography
• Critical perspective on farming and agricultural transitions
• Rural gentrification, rural homelessness and displacement from the countryside
• Filmic representations of the countryside as a place of idyll and horror
• Emotional and embodied attachment to rural communities, landscapes and natures
• Rural regeneration ambitions, practices and responses