Scaling the Rural: Reflections on Rural Cultural Studies

How can cultural analysis be brought to bear on the rural? This central question for rural cultural studies prompts our exploration of how the rural has been delineated and interpreted in the developed West, as a departure for thinking about new intellectual approaches to rurality that span spaces, times and academic disciplines. In this paper we adopt a broad schema, discussing insights from rural studies, cultural geography and history. As Michael Woods (Rural Geography) has handily pointed out, 'rural' is