Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods

April Mandrona, Claudia Mitchell

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813588179
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Children's Studies in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

 
Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods brings together visual studies and childhood studies to explore images of childhood in the study of rurality and rural life. The volume highlights how the voices of children themselves remain central to investigations of rural childhoods. Contributions look at representations and experiences of rural childhoods from both the Global North and Global South (including U.S., Canada, Haiti, India, Sweden, Slovenia, South Africa, Russia, Timor-Leste, and Colombia) and consider visuals ranging from picture books to cell phone video to television. 

1

Introduction

April Mandrona and Claudia Mitchell

Beginnings

The notion of rurality and childhood occupies a paradoxical position in the everyday lives of both children and adults in contemporary society in both the Global North and the Global South. On the one hand, the world is itself increasingly urban, a fact that the United Nations reminds us of in its Sustainable Development Goals for 2015 to 2030. In countries like Canada, Sweden, and the United States, approximately 80 percent of the population lives in urban settings (Statistics Canada 2011; Swedish National Rural Developmental Agency 2007; United States Census Bureau 2010). In the Global South, migration through displacement and as a feature of economic redistribution means that urbanization is also a feature of daily life. According to the United Nations (2014), 54 percent of the world’s population lives in cities (3.4 billion people). This number is expected to increase, particularly in so-called developing regions such as Africa; this will generate numerous studies about cities and the metropolis. On the other hand, the majority of the world’s children (from birth to the age of nineteen) reside in rural locales (UNICEF 2012), and for many, rurality remains a feature of the everyday. Even people who have migrated to the cities come from (and bring along with them) the rural. Indeed, many people carry with them generational traces of the rural long after they have physically left the rural area. Rural life can continue to occupy a space in memory and through photographs and other artifacts, even though migration practices and the growth of the digital world may mean that there are fewer physical and mental traces of the rural left.

Academic interest in rural childhoods and children’s sociocultural positioning is still relatively recent. Colin Ward’s The Child in the Country is a notable exception. Writing about the shifting landscape of rural childhoods in the United Kingdom up to the 1980s, he not only sparked interest in this area of research but did much to illuminate the neglected experiences of growing up rural. As he put it, “Only a small minority of children living in the country today are the sons and daughters of farm workers. The ‘village children’ have disappeared from history. But they were scarcely ever in it, even though they were once the majority of all children” (1988, 10).

His work offers a critical reading of a world that changed drastically for children in the post–World War II years. He highlights the impact of communication and transportation (primarily in relation to a reduction in services) on the life-choices of children and young people. Richard Mabey, in his foreword to the book, emphasizes the value of a country childhood. As he notes, “But if Colin Ward’s book exposes the sentimental myth of ‘the country child’ it also triumphantly justifies the value of a country childhood. Our recent history is full of examples of the growing and learning that happened when children, regardless of whether they are from rural or urban background, live for a while in close contact with the land and other living things” (1988, 19). In the field of child studies and children’s geography, young people growing up in the countryside were thought of as a “hidden geography” (Matthews et al. 2000, 142), invisible in the rural landscape and constituting part of the marginalized “rural others” (141) or those positioned by intersecting categories of class, property ownership, gender, race, health, and sexuality (Halfacree 2003; Norman et al. 2015). While the universal model of childhood continues to be deconstructed, seeing and revealing the diversity of “other childhoods” (Kesby, Gwanzura-Ottemoller, and Chizororo 2006), local culturally specific understandings of childhood need to be theorized and unpacked through questions such as the following: What is the intersectional nature of macro-social constructs? How do dominant discourses on rural childhood work to mobilize mainstream (white, straight, adult male) perspectives? How might the formulation of a transnational feminist solidarity with children living across rural contexts operate? It has been almost a decade since the release of the pivotal work on researching rural childhoods, Global Perspectives on Rural Childhood and Youth: Young Rural Lives (Panelli, Punch, and Robson 2007). Indeed, despite a sustained interest in the lives of rural children, as evidenced by numerous interventions, journal articles, and, perhaps especially, recent conferences (for example, “Re-imagining Rurality” [February 2015]; “The Great Outdoors? Children, Young People and Families in Natural and Rural Spaces” [September 2015]), there is a dearth of work concerned with establishing concrete procedures for more effective and just research practices, contemporary theorizations of rural childhoods, and novel approaches to the relationship between space/place and childhood, particularly ones that seek to push the boundaries of transdisciplinary research in the study of life stages.

Visual Studies, Rurality, and the Everyday Lives of Children

Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods brings together two areas of inquiry—children’s rural geographies and visual studies. Somewhat surprisingly, the significance of the visual in children’s rural geographies is an understudied area, although there are numerous studies of rurality in which we occasionally see mention of children. Some of the best-known photographs produced by Dorothea Lange, for example, depict the children of migrant laborers. Her images and life story, as Linda Gordon observes, “afford a view of aspects of history often unnoticed. . . . Her 1920s San Francisco experience suggests that West Coast modernism, even in big cities, was significantly less urban than in the East. Her 1930s experience showed the centrality of the rural experience to the mid-century United States; by putting farmworkers at the center of Depression history, her photography exposes a major failure of the New Deal” (2009, xx). Although rural childhood is not the focus of Douglas Harper’s (2001) sociological study of historical photographs of the American dairy farm from the 1930s, clearly the significance of children’s labor is represented, and so again we are reminded of the presence of children and childhood. The landmark study in visual anthropology by Collier and Collier (1967) of rural Nova Scotia includes images of children, even though the study itself is not specifically of children and young people. Even a recent photo exhibition at the Cape Breton University Art Gallery (Sydney, Nova Scotia, and the Confederation Centre of the Arts art gallery, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island) of “Doing Their Own Thing: Back-to-the-Landers in Eastern Canada,” curated by two offspring of back-to-the-landers, pays only fleeting attention to the experiences of children. Finally, it is worth noting that Rosemary Shirley’s (2015) recent book, Rural Modernism, Everyday Life, and Visual Culture, which examines the ways in which various aspects of visual culture (advertisements, photographs, litter, art, and scrapbooks) might be taken as evidence in the study of rural life in the United Kingdom, looks only briefly at the everyday traces of childhood.

To date, there are few studies that have looked specifically at images of childhood as an entry point to studying rurality, even though we are used to, for example, seeing images of nature and what we might think of as the wide open spaces associated with childhood that seek to evoke a sense of freedom and innocence and perhaps a sense of loss and yearning for what once was, as Patricia Holland reminds us in Picturing Childhood (2004). An exception is a piece by Owain Jones (2011) on cinematic representations of rural childhoods. While Holland does not focus directly on images of rurality, her analysis of posters, greeting cards, images on the Internet, and so on highlights the significance of this popular imagery in shaping different aspects of childhood. The images of rurality and nature, whether they are of babies and young children dressed up as bunnies or are wholesome images of children playing in wide-open spaces, suggest a world of childhood that is free from the encumbrances of the city. Anne Higonnet in her book Pictures of Innocence highlights the ways in which images of childhood continue to dominate the popular imagination. As she notes, “Pictures of children are at once the most common, the most sacred, and the most controversial images of our time. They guard the cherished ideal of childhood innocence, yet they contain within them the potential to undo that ideal. No subject seems cuter or more sentimental, and we take none more for granted, yet pictures of children have proved dangerously difficult to understand or control” (1998, 1). In her analysis, Higonnet considers the ways in which various actors construct popular and controversial images of childhood; these include the producers of advertisements. She cites the case of an ad for the pain medication Children’s Tylenol®, which draws on an image of the Madonna and Child, and considers the designers of record albums (for example, Van Halen’s Balance album cover). She looks at mothers-as-photographers, as in the case of Sally Mann, taking up in particular the knowingness (disturbing to some) of children and involving the children themselves (as colluders or as agents). She explores images actually produced by children through photography, as in the case of Wendy Ewald and Eric Gottesman’s collaborative work with children (see this volume). Higonnet draws attention to the significance of a study of childhood that is not bounded by the usual tropes of innocence and unknowingness.

Interestingly, both Mann’s images and many of the images produced by the children in Ewald’s various photography projects do draw on rural childhood, at least in an implicit way. Mann’s photographs of her own children are primarily set on their farm property in Lexington, Virginia, with rural subject spaces such as the river and the rolling countryside as backdrop. Mann explains in Hold Still: A Memoir in Photographs her long hours of trying to capture with her children something of them in that space. “At the farm, the honeyed September light and the lazy, limpid river, offered as always the cure, the balm for my bunged up soul. At the farm there is no reason for photography-as-inoculation, no fear and no danger. Just the land and the river and the sheltering cliffs, the comfort of the colossal trees” (2015, 120). Ewald’s photography projects with children date back to the late 1960s (Ewald, Weinberg, and Stahel 2000). She has worked with children in rural areas in Kentucky, with the Naskapi on a First Nations reservation in Canada, and with children in both rural and urban settings in India, Colombia, Mexico, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and, most recently, Palestine. For her, the idea of children’s experience of place is key. As she writes in her introduction to Secret Games, “From St. Augustine to Wordsworth to contemporary psychologists, thinkers have pondered the complex and seemingly uninhibited world of childhood. To ask children themselves to participate in my exploration of their world, I thought, would be to acknowledge that it is their experience, and that rather than being made to ‘mind their place,’ children might be helped to find ways of illuminating and sharing their inner lives” (2000, 17).

Picturing Theory

What would it mean to theorize rurality and childhood through the visual? How does the visual romanticize, exoticize, or reflect rural childhoods? How are rural childhoods and the associated social value systems being redefined by the visual and vice versa? What implications do visual representations have for the lives of rural children? The concept of spatial justice as proposed by Edward Soja (2010) offers an overarching theoretical framework for the book that is consistent with the idea of visuality and the concept of rendering the often invisible visible. This theory attempts to account for the ways in which conventional approaches to social justice fall short in engaging with spatial processes and forces. In applying this framework to rural spaces, we aim to move past ingrained perceptions of the rural as deficient, fringe locales in need of development, and beyond interventions that position capitalist-driven urbanization as the solution to rural problems. We seek to illuminate the complex and multiple linkages between communities. Soja defines spatial justice not as a “substitute or alternative to social, economic, or other forms of justice but rather a way of looking at justice from a critical spatial perspective. From this viewpoint, there is always a relevant spatial dimension to justice while at the same time all geographies have expressions of justice and injustice built into them” (2009, 2). Discrimination, exclusion, and narrow perceptions of rural life can be understood as a form of social invisibility, and rural identity politics can be conceptualized as a struggle to obtain accurate public visibility. In this book, we are interested in the relationship of the visual to what Soja (2009) thinks of as the socio-spatial dialect. This major tenet of critical spatial thinking is concerned with the ways in which the spatial shapes the social and vice versa. We also draw on Roberts and Green’s extension of spatial justice to understand the relationship between modernism, urbanity, globalization, and government in relation to the marginalization of rural environments. They argue that the “global world values cosmopolitan ways of being, themselves inherently urban” (2013, 771), rendering rural meanings as inconsequential to understanding the contemporary world.

By examining rural childhoods through visual approaches, we aim to articulate some of the underlying processes that create and resist spatial inequity for rural children. Various researchers have begun to explore the significance of rurality in the context of place-based consciousness (see Corbett 2007). Building on this understanding, Balfour, Mitchell, and Moletsane (2008; 2011) argue for a generative theory of rurality. These authors reject definitions that are fixed and oppressive and, instead, describe the rural environment as changeable and vibrant. As this theoretical framework accounts for the varied and complex relationships between people and rural landscapes, the environment is positioned as an active force in the formation of individual and community identities. But what would this idea of a generative theory of rurality look like in relation to rural childhoods? And how might the visual contribute to this work? We consider here four broad areas or themes of rurality and childhood that serve as entry points to exploring this question.

Rurality: What Is There or What Is Not There?

Relebohile Moletsane contends, “It is [the] strengths (or assets) that need to be harnessed in understanding the human condition and in developing interventions to effect social change” (2012, 4). The process of identifying and mobilizing the existing strengths and resources in rural communities necessitates positioning people as “protagonists taking action in their everyday lives” (Moletsane et al. 2008, 5) and adopting place-conscious and context-specific strategies. As social actors, “people make use of time, space, and resources differently to transform an environment rather than be subject to it” (Balfour 2012, 9). Balfour points to the usefulness of visual data (such as participant drawings) in helping to navigate the complex ambiguity of assets and agencies that results from “the role that perception plays in determining whether these are possibilities or limitations” (16).

For example, research with young people by Mandrona (2014) in an area of rural South Africa demonstrated how the visual reveals the ways in which the countryside is simultaneously a site of constraint (as a legacy of apartheid and the deliberate und...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: Images and Imaginings in the Study of Rural Childhoods
• Part II: Acts of Memory and Imagination
• Part III: How We See It: Children’s Participation in Studying Rural Childhoods
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Index