Rural Cultural Research Program

Introduction and Aims:

The ARC Cultural Research Networkaddresses national needs for a more integrated research approach to understanding complex social, cultural and technological change, and seeks to facilitate the development of innovative collaborative research projects through the following autonomous nodes: Cultural Technologies; Cultural Literacies; Cultural Histories and Geographies; Cultural Identities; Media Histories; and Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Development.

The Cultural Histories and Geographies nodehas developed a three year (2006-2008) program of activities in ‘rural cultural research’. This will include workshops, symposia and masterclasses for postgraduate and early career researchers, and other activities over the period. Outcomes include a substantial web-based resource database, grant applications, and publications.

The overarching aims of the Rural Cultural Research Program are:

• To bring together scholars from cultural studies, history and geography whose research interests fall into ‘rural cultural research’;
• To explore new interdisciplinary models for rural cultural research: how can we define methodological, interpretative and political parameters of this field of interdisciplinary cultural research?
• To enrich partnerships between universities and rural communities, and between universities, communities and relevant cultural institutions;
• To initiate new interdisciplinary research partnerships between metropolitan and regional universities, encompassing the support of postgraduate and early career researchers, including those in non-metropolitan locations;
• To open up Australian-based rural cultural research to international comparisons and links, and in doing so encourage Australian-based research to have international impact.

We are interested in examining how people make sense of their lived experience and locality, and how this is shaped by and influenced by government policy and planning, as well as wider environmental ‘problems’. Our research will examine new, continuing (or changing) discourses of rurality, including:

• Progress and sustainability;
• Equity and access;
• Community;
• The rural idyll, especially in relation to:
  • sea changing and tree changing,
    
  • cosmopolitanism,
    
  • aesthetics and landscape.

Such discourses are framed by wider understandings of the interconnections between rurality, suburbanism and urbanism; between localized and national ‘belonging’, citizenship and identity; and through understandings of mobility and life-course transition.

The project coordinators are Professor Kate Darian-Smith (Cultural Histories sub-node coordinator; Director, The Australian Centre, University of Melbourne) and Dr Chris Gibson (Cultural Geographies sub-node coordinator; GeoQuest Research Centre, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Wollongong).

Core participants involved in planning the program are Dr Kate Bowles (School of Social Sciences, Media and Communications, University of Wollongong), Professor David Carter (Director, Australian Studies Centre, University of Queensland), and Associate Professor Gordon Waitt (GeoQuest Research Centre, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Wollongong).