Im Spannungsfeld einer Abwendung von herkoemmlichen Raumauffassungen in Zeiten der Globalisierung sowie einer gleichzeitigen 'Ruckkehr' des Raumes in Form einer Sehnsucht nach (Selbst)Verortung lasst sich in der deutschsprachigen Literatur der letzten Jahrzehnte eine Hinwendung zu komplexen Gestaltungen literarischer Raume beobachten. Der Raum ist nicht nur Ausdruck von (geschlechtsspezifischen) Machtverhaltnissen und Lebensentwurfen, sondern wirkt auch selbst auf die Handlung ein. Auf der Basis verschiedener Raumtheorien, die im Zuge des spatial turn in den Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaften verstarkt Beachtung fanden, untersucht die Autorin Texte von Schriftstellerinnen, die mit dem umstrittenen Etikett "literarisches Frauleinwunder" versehen wurden, aus raumkonstruktivistischer Perspektive.

Drawing from decades of research, Setha Low shows how public space contributes to a flourishing society through promoting social justice and democratic practices. Thriving public spaces also enhance creativity, health, urban resilience, and environmental sustainability. Yet more than ever, public spaces across the world are threatened by urban development, privatization and neglect. Public spaces - where people from all walks of life play, work, meet, talk, read, think, debate, and protest - are vital to a healthy civic life. And, as the eminent scholar of public space Setha Low argues in Why Public Space Matters, even fleeting moments of visibility and encounter in these spaces tend to foster a broader worldview and our willingness to accept difference. Such experiences also enhance flexible thinking, problem solving, creativity, and inclusiveness. There are many such spaces, but they all enhance social life. Sidewalks and plazas offer business opportunities for small-scale entrepreneurs who cannot afford store space. Public parks have long provided major cultural attractions, from plays to concerts, at little or no cost to the public. Central squares have a storied tradition as arenas for demonstrations and political protests. Parks and waterways create sustainable greenways, and during disasters, all manner of public spaces become centers for food delivery and shelter. To illustrate their value, Low draws from decades of research in public spaces across the Americas, from New York to Costa Rica. Yet we are losing public spaces to accelerated urban development and the belief that public spaces are expendable. Just as important is the broad-scale and ongoing privatization of public space by corporate actors. Low explores why public spaces matter today, how they are at risk, and what we can do about protecting these essential places that support our everyday lives. Finally, she shows how we can work to promote public space protection and expansion at both the grassroots and global levels. Throughout, she focuses on real public spaces and the people who use them in cities and regions across the Americas, from New Jersey to Costa Rica. A powerful, defining statement on a foundational contributor to healthy civic life, Low's book not only details what we are at risk of losing, but shows us how we can not only stop the losses, but work to expand the number of spaces available to the public.

Rural issues have gained national prominence in Britain in recent years. The future of hunting, the Foot and Mouth outbreak, farm income and agricultural reform and housing development have all claimed political and media attention, promoted by a vocal rural lobby and headline-grabbing protests and demonstrations. Combining detailed empirical research and case studies with theoretically informed critical analysis, this book provides an overview of the contemporary politics of the British countryside. It explores how and why rural issues have suddenly achieved such political prominence, by examining the changing politics and governance of rural Britain from the local to the national scale over the past century. It investigates the social, economic and institutional restructuring of rural communities and argues that we are witnessing not so much a rural politics, but a 'politics of the rural' in which the definition and representation of rurality itself has become the key focus of conflict.

The Poison in the Gift is a detailed ethnography of gift-giving in a North Indian village that powerfully demonstrates a new theoretical interpretation of caste. Introducing the concept of ritual centrality, Raheja shows that the position of the dominant landholding caste in the village is grounded in a central-peripheral configuration of castes rather than a hierarchical ordering. She advances a view of caste as semiotically constituted of contextually shifting sets of meanings, rather than one overarching ideological feature. This new understanding undermines the controversial interpretation advanced by Louis Dumont in his 1966 book, Homo Hierarchicus, in which he proposed a disjunction between the ideology of hierarchy based on the purity of the Brahman priest and the temporal power of the dominant caste or the king.

For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist to begin the unparalleled span of eleven years' fieldwork that has resulted in this book-a comprehensive, vivid, and nuanced account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural China from 1949 to 1999. The author's focus on the personal and the emotional sets this book apart from most studies of the Chinese family. Yan explores private lives to examine areas of family life that have been largely overlooked, such as emotion, desire, intimacy, privacy, conjugality, and individuality. He concludes that the past five decades have witnessed a dual transformation of private life: the rise of the private family, within which the private lives of individual women and men are thriving.

This book explores gender dynamics in the indigenous villages (also known as walled villages) in post-handover Hong Kong. It looks at how Hong Kong's reunification with China has impacted the walled villagers, in particular the women, and how the walled villages' current gender dynamics in return reflects the changes that have happened in Hong Kong after the reunification with China. It traces the historical development of the walled villages, outlines the nature of walled-village society, and explores the changes currently at work including the erosion of the rural/urban divide, the increasing participation of indigenous women in Hong Kong society more widely and the breakdown of traditional social norms, especially patriarchy.

The arsons started on a cold November midnight and didn't stop for months. Night after night, the people of Accomack County waited to see which building would burn down next, regarding each other at first with compassion, and later suspicion. Vigilante groups sprang up, patrolling the rural Virginia coast with cameras and camouflage. Volunteer firefighters slept at their stations. The arsonist seemed to target abandoned buildings, but local police were stretched too thin to surveil them all. Accomack was desolate-there were hundreds of abandoned buildings. And by the dozen they were burning. The culprit, and the path that led to these crimes, is a story of twenty-first century America. Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse first drove down to the reeling county to cover a hearing for Charlie Smith, a struggling mechanic who upon his capture had promptly pleaded guilty to sixty-seven counts of arson. But as Charlie's confession unspooled, it got deeper and weirder. He wasn't lighting fires alone; his crimes were galvanized by a surprising love story. Over a year of investigating, Hesse uncovered the motives of Charlie and his accomplice, girlfriend Tonya Bundick, a woman of steel-like strength and an inscrutable past. Theirs was a love built on impossibly tight budgets and simple pleasures. They were each other's inspiration and escape...until they weren't. Though it's hard to believe today, one hundred years ago Accomack was the richest rural county in the nation. Slowly it's been drained of its industry-agriculture-as well as its wealth and population. In an already remote region, limited employment options offer little in the way of opportunity. A mesmerizing and crucial panorama with nationwide implications, American Fire asks what happens when a community gets left behind. Hesse brings to life the Eastern Shore and its inhabitants, battling a punishing economy and increasingly terrified by a string of fires they could not explain. The result evokes the soul of rural America-a land half gutted before the fires even began.

Since the Chinese Communists took control of Inner Mongolia, very little has been written about that region, the vast steppeland of northern China. This book charts the recent history of the pastoral Mongolian minority there. It examines the effects of five decades of social engineering by the Chinese state, and explores the role of economic forms, ritual, symbolism, and ideology in the transformations and continuities of life on the inner Mongolian steppe.

In twenty-first-century China, socialist educational traditions have given way to practices that increasingly emphasize the individual. This volume investigates that trend, drawing on Hansen's fieldwork in a rural high school in Zhejiang where students, teachers, and officials of different generations, genders, and social backgrounds form what is essentially a miniature version of Chinese society. Hansen paints a complex picture of the emerging "neosocialist" educational system and shows how individualization of students both challenges and reinforces state control of society.

The rural tourism sector has become a key driver for social and economic growth and a major source of income for developing and low-income countries in many parts of Asia. Rural tourism is progressively viewed as a solution, increasing the economic viability of marginalised areas, stimulating social regeneration and improving the living conditions of rural communities. Responsible rural tourism promotes conservation of the natural environment, protects the authenticity of culture, and offers socioeconomic opportunities and benefits for local communities. This book encompasses case studies from a range of Asian countries and examines both successful and failed attempts in developing responsible rural tourism, and the learnings that we can adopt and adapt for future responsible rural tourism in the region. It will be of interest to students, researchers, stakeholders and policymakers in tourism.

This book is a study of a serious illness in a New Guinea village. It records the failure of local treatments and Western medicine, and of a communal ritual to bring a spirit to heal a man; it also shows how cultural beliefs and assumptions may influence events. The author, an anthropologist and medical doctor, focuses on how those closely involved maintained their hope and beliefs, and how they faced the realization of failure.

Before collectivization of agriculture in Estonia, "kulaks" (better-off farmers) were persecuted and many of them were finally deported in March 1949. This book is situated on the local level; the aim is to understand what these processes meant from the perspective of the Estonian rural population, a kind of study that has been missing so far.

Analyzes the mechanisms of repression, applying new aspects. Repression was mainly conducted through a bureaucratic process where individual denunciations were not even necessary. The main tool of persecution was a screening of the rural population with the help of records, censuses and local knowledge, in order to identify, or invent, "kulak families." Moreover, in the Estonian sources, the World War II history of each individual was a crucial part of screenings. The prisoners of war of the Red Army, held in camps in Estonia, played an unexpected part in this campaign. Another result is a so far neglected wave of peaceful resistance as the kulak identifications were challenged in 1947-48. This has not been addressed in the existing literature. The results mainly answer the question "how" this process worked, whereas the question "why" finds hypothetical responses in the life trajectories of actors.

This book is unique in addressing rural transport policy issues in a comprehensive and rigorous way. Much has been written in recent years about urban transport and policy, but in both transport research itself and in implemented transport policies we have seen rural transport needs take second place to urban issues.
The book sets out to define the key transport issues involved in a rural context and goes on to explore specific policies to deal with these issues.
Throughout, the book combines original research and specially conducted international surveys with an overview of the available literature, providing a valuable and uniquely thorough resource. Taking as its main focus the specific context of British rural transport issues, the work provides in-depth research which, while local in its starting-point, is international in its perspective and implications.
The aim of the book is not so much to provide answers to the various transport problems but to provide a foundation for the formulation of ideas.

This classic, bestselling study of the Kung San, foragers of the Dobe area of the Kalahari Desert describes a people's reactions to the forces of modernization, detailing relatively recent changes to Kung rituals, beliefs, social structure, marriage and kinship system. It documents their determination to take hold of their own destiny, despite exploitation of their habitat and relentless development to assert their political rights and revitalize their communities. Use of the name Ju/'hoansi (meaning "real people") acknowledges their new sense of empowerment. Since the publication of the Third Edition in 2003, Richard Lee has made eight further trips to the Kalahari, the most recent in 2010 and 2011. The Dobe and Nyae Nyae Areas have continued to transform and the people have had to respond and adapt to the pressures of capitalist economics and bureaucratic governance of the Namibian and Botswana states. This Fourth Edition chronicles and bears witness to these evolving social conditions and their impacts on lives of the Ju/'hoansi.

China's dismantling of the Mao-era rural commune system and return to individual household farming under Deng Xiaoping has been seen as a successful turn away from a misguided social experiment and a rejection of the disastrous policies that produced widespread famine. In this revisionist study, Joshua Eisenman marshals previously inaccessible data to overturn this narrative, showing that the commune modernized agriculture, increased productivity, and spurred an agricultural green revolution that laid the foundation for China's future rapid growth. Red China's Green Revolution tells the story of the commune's origins, evolution, and downfall, demonstrating its role in China's economic ascendance. After 1970, the commune emerged as a hybrid institution, including both collective and private elements, with a high degree of local control over economic decision but almost no say over political ones. It had an integrated agricultural research and extension system that promoted agricultural modernization and collectively owned local enterprises and small factories that spread rural industrialization. The commune transmitted Mao's collectivist ideology and enforced collective isolation so it could overwork and underpay its households. Eisenman argues that the commune was eliminated not because it was unproductive, but because it was politically undesirable: it was the post-Mao leadership led by Deng Xiaoping-not rural residents-who chose to abandon the commune in order to consolidate their control over China. Based on detailed and systematic national, provincial, and county-level data, as well as interviews with agricultural experts and former commune members, Red China's Green Revolution is a comprehensive historical and social scientific analysis that fundamentally challenges our understanding of recent Chinese economic history.

Webs of Power offers a fresh perspective on women in Southeast Asia. Focusing on one rural Minangkabau village, the book provides vital insights into the gendered processes of post-coloniality. The Minangkabau living in West Sumatra are the largest matrilineal group in the world. They have intrigued generations of scholars because they are matrilineal and Islamic. By exploring the contestations and accommodations women and men make with state and Islamic ideologies, Webs of Power discloses the processes at the heart of globalization as well as the complexities of kinship and power in a rural agricultural community. The book challenges conventional thinking about matriliny, showing the prominence of senior women in all aspects of village life.

In Downeast, Gigi Georges follows five girls as they come of age in one of the most challenging and geographically isolated regions on the Eastern seaboard. Their stories reveal surprising truths about rural America and offer hope for its future. "It's almost impossible not to care about these fierce young women and cheer for their hard-won successes" (Kirkus) in this "heartfelt portrait" and "worthy tribute" (Publishers Weekly). Nestled in Maine's far northeast corner, Washington County sits an hour's drive from the heart of famed and bustling Acadia National Park. Yet it's a world away. For Willow, Vivian, Mckenna, Audrey, and Josie-five teenage girls caught between tradition and transformation in this remote region-it is home. Downeast follows their journeys of heartbreak and hope in uncertain times, creating a nuanced and unique portrait of rural America with women at its center. Willow lives in the shadow of an abusive, drug-addicted father and searches for stability through photography and love. Vivian, a gifted writer, feels stifled by her church and town, and struggles to break free without severing family ties. Mckenna is a softball pitching phenom whose passion is the lobster-fishing she learned at her father's knee. Audrey is a beloved high school basketball star who earns a coveted college scholarship but questions her chosen path. Josie, a Yale-bound valedictorian, is determined to take the world by storm. All five girls know the pain and joy of life in a region whose rugged beauty and stoicism mask dwindling populations, vanishing job opportunities, and pervasive opioid addiction. As the girls reach adulthood, they discover that despite significant challenges, there is much to celebrate in "the valley of the overlooked." Their stories remind us of the value of timeless ideals: strength of family and community, reverence for nature's rule, dignity in cracked hands and muddied shoes, and the enduring power of home. Revealed through the eyes of Willow, Vivian, Mckenna, Audrey, and Josie, Downeast is based on four years of intimate reporting. The result is a beautifully rendered, emotionally startling, and vital book. Downeast will break readers' hearts yet offer them hope, providing answers to what the future may hold for rural America.

Urbanormativity explores a cultural ideology that posits that urban is normal and desirable while rural is deviant, exotic, or undesirable. This work examines the relevance and meaning of this phenomenon in three parts: reality, which discusses the urbanization of the planet and the inherent conflict that emerges from the condition of urban dependency; representations, which discusses the cultural dynamics of urbanormativity; and everyday life, which focuses on the outcomes of urbanormativity in terms of the legal and political landscape, emphasizing the role of spatial inequality in creating urban-rural disparities. The book then examines life in rural communities amid urbanormativity, highlighting such processes as rural gentrification as well as the transformation of the character and tradition of rural communities through the process of place structuration. This book conclude by developing a new rural justice ethic that advocates for the incorporation of Sen's notion of capability maximization along with a concerted effort to revalue the rural-socially, culturally, politically, and economically.

Unil the later nineteenth century the great landlords and the gentry were the central element in the social and political life of the country, and even as late as 1940, in the supreme crisis of English history, the choice of leader lay between a grandson of the 11th Earl of Devon and a grandson of the 7th Duke of Marlborough. This book examines the social and legal foundations of this class - the estate and the family - from the late seventeenth century, when it freed itself from many of the constraints of royal power, to the present century when it became submerged by mass democracy. It sets out to answer the question why, in the first industrial nation, the landed elite so long retained its role. Sir John Habakkuk's comprehensive examination of the structure of the landed family, its estate, and its relations with other social groups sheds light on this problem, and makes a major contribution to historical debate.

Welcome to Madison Park, a small community in Alabama founded by freed slaves in 1880. And meet Eric Motley, a native son who came of age in this remarkable place where constant lessons in self-determination, hope, and unceasing belief in the American dream taught him everything he needed for his journey to the Oval Office as a special assistant to President George W. Bush. Eric grew up among people whose belief was to "give" and never turn away from your neighbor's need. There was Aunt Shine, the goodly matriarch who cared so much about young Motley's schooling that she would stand up in a crowded church and announce Eric's progress or his shortcomings. There was Old Man Salery, who secretly siphoned gasoline from his beat-up car into the Motleys' tank at night. There were Motley's grandparents, who bought books for Eric they couldn't afford, spending the last of their seed money. And there was Reverend Brinkley, a man of enormous faith and simple living. It was said that whenever the Reverend came your way, light abounded. Life in Madison Park wasn't always easy or fair, and Motley reveals personal and heartbreaking stories of racial injustice and segregation. But Eric shows how the community taught him everything he needed to know about love and faith. This charming, engaging, and deeply inspiring memoir will help you remember that we can create a world of shared values based on love and hope. It is a story that reveals the amazing power of faith in God and each other. If you're in search of hope during troubled times, look no further than Madison Park.

This book focuses on the transition of hundreds of rural households in ten villages in Zhejiang from 1986 to 2002, based on the theme of rural household sustainable development. Drawing on a large amount of first-hand data collected from fixed observation sites for 17 consecutive years, this book has depicted the changes in household behaviour in rural Zhejiang, and analysed the origins of such changes. The contents of the book contain examinations at household and village level. Chapters One to Seven describe the changes in rural behaviour at the household level from different aspects, such as land transfer, saving and borrowing, and rural tax burden. Chapters Eight to Ten analyse the transition concerning household behaviour based on the village level data. This book will help readers with a better understanding of rural China from the micro perspective of household behaviour. This book won the Monograph Award (ranked 1st out of 6 winners in total) in the Third China Rural Development Research Award (2008). It was also awarded theSecond Class Excellent Research Achievement in Humanities and Social Sciences by the Ministry of Education (2009). With the help of rich and detailed first-hand data collected from fixed observation sites in ten villages in Zhejiang for 17 consecutive years, this book gives a panoramic analysis of Chinese rural society in transition from the viewpoint of rural household behaviour. It starts the examination from individual rural households, before develops the investigation to the whole villages, so that the study could be carried out in a coherent, reliable and systematic way. Viewing the countryside from its micro perspective under the national political economy framework, the book steps out of the traditional way of inspecting exclusively the rural households and therefore is able to generalise its conclusion at a macro level. The award selection panel in 2008 believed it a unique monography for understanding the macro transition of the Chinese "agriculture, countryside and peasant ( )" issues from the micro aspect of household behaviour.

How prisons became economic development strategies for rural Appalachian communities As the United States began the project of mass incarceration, rural communities turned to building prisons as a strategy for economic development. More than 350 prisons have been built in the U.S. since 1980, with certain regions of the country accounting for large shares of this dramatic growth. Central Appalachia is one such region; there are eight prisons alone in Eastern Kentucky. If Kentucky were its own country, it would have the seventh highest incarceration rate in the world. In Coal, Cages, Crisis, Judah Schept takes a closer look at this stunning phenomenon, providing insight into prison growth, jail expansion and rising incarceration rates in America's hinterlands. Drawing on interviews, site visits, and archival research, Schept traces recent prison growth in the region to the rapid decline of its coal industry. He takes us inside this startling transformation occurring in the coalfields, where prisons are often built on top of old coalmines, including mountaintop removal sites, and built into community planning approaches to crises of unemployment, population loss, and declining revenues. By linking prison growth to other sites in this landscape-coal mines, coal waste, landfills, and incinerators-Schept shows that the prison boom has less to do with crime and punishment and much more with the overall extraction, depletion, and waste disposal processes that characterize dominant development strategies for the region. Schept argues that the future of this area now hangs in the balance, detailing recent efforts to oppose its carceral growth. Coal, Cages, Crisis offers invaluable insight into the complex dynamics of mass incarceration that continue to shape Appalachia and the broader United States.

Crime is often perceived as an urban issue rather than a problem that occurs in rural areas, but how far is this view tenable? This book explores the relationship between crime and community in rural areas and addresses the notion of safety as part of the community dynamics in such areas. Rural Crime and Community Safety makes a significant contribution to crime science and integrates a range of theories to understand patterns of crime and perceived safety in rural contexts. Based on a wealth of original research, Ceccato combines spatial methods with qualitative analysis to examine, in detail, farm and wildlife crime, youth related crimes and gendered violence in rural settings. Making the most of the expanding field of Criminology and of the growing professional inquiry into crime and crime prevention in rural areas; rural development; and the social sustainability of rural areas, this book builds a bridge by connecting Criminology and Human Geography. This book will be suitable for academics, students and practitioners in the fields of criminology, community safety, rural studies, rural development and gender studies.

'Poignant ... A meditation on life, love and the importance of nature' IRISH TIMES Thirty-four years ago, when they were in their twenties, Niall Williams and Christine Breen made the impulsive decision to leave their lives in New York City and move to Christine's ancestral home in the town of Kiltumper in rural Ireland. In the decades that followed, the pair dedicated themselves to writing, gardening and living a life that followed the rhythms of the earth. In 2019, with Christine in the final stages of recovery from cancer and the land itself threatened by the arrival of turbines just one farm over, Niall and Christine decided to document a year of living in their garden and in their small corner of a rapidly changing world. Proceeding month by month through the year, this is the story of a garden in all its many splendours, and a couple who have made their life observing its wonders.

A SUNDAY TELEGRAPH AND GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR WINNER OF SWEDEN'S AUGUST PRIZE WINNER OF THE WARWICK PRIZE FOR WOMEN IN TRANSLATION SHORTLISTED FOR THE BRITISH ACADEMY BOOK PRIZE 'Osebol is a magnificent success; it is hard to imagine it better ... Kapla is a magician ... mesmerizing' Sara Wheeler, TLS 'A simple, pared-back and down-to-earth masterpiece' James Rebanks 'We listen to them like something caught on the wind ... so moving and so strangely beckoning' Nicci Gerrard, Observer '[Among] the year's most pleasing books' Rishi Dastidar, Guardian, Books of the Year 'Engrossing and humbling and quietly revelatory' Max Porter 'Fascinating ... I was riveted' Lydia Davis 'Like standing outside an open window on a warm summer evening and listening to a piece of contemporary history' Lanstidningen 'What a wonderful book . . . You want to move into it' Expressen Near the river Klaralven, snug in the dense forest landscape of northern Varmland, lies the secluded village of Osebol. It is a quiet place: one where relationships take root over decades, and where the bustle of city life is replaced by the sound of wind in the trees. In this extraordinary and engrossing book, an unexpected cultural phenomenon in its native Sweden, the stories of Osebol's residents are brought to life in their own words. Over the last half-century, the automation of the lumber industry and the steady relocations to the cities have seen the village's adult population fall to roughly forty. But still, life goes on; heirlooms are passed from hand to hand, and memories from mouth to mouth, while new arrivals come from near and far. Marit Kapla has interviewed nearly every villager between the ages of 18 and 92, recording their stories verbatim. What emerges is at once a familiar chronicle of great social metamorphosis, told from the inside, and a beautifully microcosmic portrait of a place and its people. To read Osebol is to lose oneself in its gentle rhythms of simple language and open space, and to emerge feeling like one has really grown to know the inhabitants of this varied community, nestled among the trees in a changing world.