Disability and Rurality: Identity, Gender and Belonging

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.

Karen Soldatic is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow (2016–2019), Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, Australia.

Kelley Johnson is Professor of Disability and Policy at the Social Policy Research Centre, University of New South Wales (UNSW Australia).