This is the first book to explore how far disability challenges dominant understandings of rurality, identity, gender and belonging within the rural literature. The book focuses particularly on the ways disabled people give, and are given, meaning and value in relation to ethical rural considerations of place, physical strength, productivity and social reciprocity. A range of different perspectives to the issues of living rurally with a disability inform this work. It includes the lived experience of people with disabilities through the use of life history methodologies, rich qualitative accounts and theoretical perspectives. It goes beyond conventional notions of rurality, grounding its analysis in a range of disability spaces and places and including the work of disability sociologists, geographers, cultural theorists and policy analysts. This interdisciplinary focus reveals the contradictory and competing relations of rurality for disabled people and the resultant impacts and effects upon disabled people and their communities materially, discursively and symbolically. Of interest to all scholars of disability, rural studies, social work and welfare, this book provides a critical intervention into the growing scholarship of rurality that has bypassed the pivotal role of disability in understanding the lived experience of rural landscapes.

Gender and Rural Geography explores the relationship between gender and rurality. Feminist theory, gender relations and sexuality have all become central concerns of geographical research and significant progress has been made in terms of our understanding of both the broad relationship between gender and geography and the more detailed differences in the lives of men and women over space. The development of feminist perspectives and the study of gender relations in geography, has, however, been fairly uneven over the discipline. Both theoretical and empirical work on gender has tended to be concentrated within social and cultural geography. Moreover it has been directed largely towards the urban sphere.

What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly marginalized group—rural women—at the center of the inquiry? In this book, Gail Hershatter explores changes in the lives of seventy-two elderly women in rural Shaanxi province during the revolutionary decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Interweaving these women’s life histories with insightful analysis, Hershatter shows how Party-state policy became local and personal, and how it affected women’s agricultural work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting—even their notions of virtue and respectability. The women narrate their pasts from the vantage point of the present and highlight their enduring virtues, important achievements, and most deeply harbored grievances. In showing what memories can tell us about gender as an axis of power, difference, and collectivity in 1950s rural China and the present, Hershatter powerfully examines the nature of socialism and how gender figured in its creation.

The essays in this collection focus on the ways rural life was represented during the long nineteenth century. Contributors bring expertise from the fields of history, geography and literature to present an interdisciplinary study of the interplay between rural space and gender during a time of increasing industrialization and social change.

Mobile phones have been shown (though not uniformly) to positively contribute in various ways to rural development, from reducing information asymmetry, improving functional networks, to increasing access to services and finance. Yet a digital gender divide exists. When contrasted with the fact that women compromise 43% of the worlds’ agricultural labor force, this digital gender divide can inhibit rural development. There is substantial exploration of the digital gender divide in the literatur e. Yet the answers to questions regarding differential access and use of information and communication technologies are mostly inconclusive. This study tries identify the information needs of the rural poor with gender dissagregated statistics.

Provides an overview of the potential role of organic agriculture in a global perspective. This book discusses political ecology, ecological justice, ecological economics, and free trade. It includes role of organic agriculture for improving soil fertility, nutrient cycling and food security and reducing veterinary medicine use, and more.

This book explores the link between the everyday relations of gender and the reform of the rural political economy in the 1980's, and argues that the reconstitution of the Chinese state in the reform era draws force and authority from the inherent politics and power of gender.