2023

Race and Place Making in the Rural Global North. Edited Special Issue. Journal of Rural Studies.

This Introduction to the Special Issue Race and Place-Making in the Rural Global North examines the intersecting logics and practices of race and place-making in rural studies. Influential approaches to rural diversity, including ‘rural cosmopolitanism’, are unable to account for the colonial and imperial foundations of rural places in the contemporary Global North. Drawing on Indigenous studies, critical race and class scholarship, this Introduction centres race and coloniality to offer a conceptualisation of contemporary rural place-making in terms of three key modalities: practice, relation and aesthetic.

This paper examines how white rural identities have been historically produced and transformed in settler Australia as a result of colonial migration regimes, the racialisation of labour, intra-distinctions of classed whiteness and projects of social mobility.

This article examines how children draw on local sources of morality and moral worth to forge connections, build friendship and enforce distinctions across difference in one rural city of settler Australia.

In studies of rural multicultures, a focus on ‘everyday multiculturalism’ obscures how colonial legacies have shaped racialised and classed hierarchies of rural belonging. This paper focuses on settler Australia and its increasingly diverse rural towns. It brings together literature on rural migration, Indigenous studies and anthropology to argue that the histories and structures of settler colonialism must be centred in research on contemporary ‘rural multicultures’. These legacies and conditions deeply shape social relations in rural Australia today.

This paper interrogates three key concepts in youth studies—transitions, the enterprising self, and mobilities — which have historically centred the experiences of white/Anglo young people in the settler Australian context.

Accelerated, transformed and new rural mobilities have altered the social and class compositions of rural places for young people across the Global North. This article reviews scholarship on young people’s social relationships across ethnic and racial differences in rural settler Australia, the US, Canada and the UK.

This paper argues for the need to better understand intercultural relationships among rural youth. It focuses on settler Australia, where labour relations, diverging visa categories and a range of mobility desires are creating and enabling new rural futures. Young people are at the forefront of these changes, forging pathways for themselves, their families and communities.

Young people from humanitarian refugee backgrounds are increasingly settling in Australia’s transforming rural communities. This chapter shows how we might better frame understanding of diverse young people’s negotiation of intercultural relationships within such rural places of heightened social change.