Exploring rurality through 'community': discourses, practices and spaces shaping Australian and New Zealand rural 'communities'.

Abstract `Community’ has a long history in both lay and academic discourses, but as contemporary rural societies are recognised to be both diverse and rapidly changing, one may ask whether `community’ is still relevant to notions of rurality. This paper extends both recent studies of rurality and discourse to consider how small and rapidly changing “communities” in Australia and New Zealand still subscribe to (and practice) forms of `community'. It proposes that a reworking of the concept of `community’ can embrace both the discursive and socially diverse nature of rural societies. In so doing the paper draws upon a framework for reading `communities’ published earlier in this Journal (Liepins, 2000a. Journal of Rural Studies, forth coming) and illustrates its application with case studies from Australia and New Zealand. Results show that `community’ is still an important notion for many rural dwellers and that it is constructed and maintained through a wide set of meanings, practices and spaces. Moreover, these analytical features are seen to be related in processes which maintain or challenge any case-specific notions of `community'; thus creating a sense of the term as a fluid and negotiated phenomenon.

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