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15 Publications
How Do Single Mothers Evaluate and Cope with Living in Rural Peripheries? Insights into the Interplay of Social and Spatial Disadvantage
When social and spatial disadvantages meet, are they doubled? Empirical studies have convincingly demonstrated that disadvantages tend to accumulate. Our paper advances this scholarship by focusing on the under-researched issue of social positions, subjective perspectives, and agency among single mothers in rural peripheries characterized by weak labor markets and accessibility issues. Drawing from problem-centered interviews conducted in eastern Germany and Czechia, we investigate how single mothers perceive …
Topics: Gender, City and Village, Social Inequalities
Urban Newcomers as Candidates in Rural Municipal Elections: Explorations in the Political Dimension of Lifestyle Migration
The lived experience and the transformative effects of urban-to-rural lifestyle migration are key research interests of rural studies, but we know little about what happens when urban dwellers make use of their local voting rights after relocating to rural areas. The paper presents insights from ethnographic explorations in a peripherialized rural region of Czechia in which social and spatial disadvantages intersect. Using an agency framework to bring the scholarship of lifestyle migration into conversation wi…
Topics: Elites, City and Village, Migration and Mobility
Financialisation and contested citizenship of ‘failed’ debtors: how overindebted people negotiate their status and rights
Centring in attention on overindebted people, the article examines ‘practices of claim-making’ from the perspective of ‘failed citizens’, insiders who lose their rights within constitutional democracies because they are perceived as failing to live up to its norms. We examined these practices in the context of the Czech debt collection system, which gives excessive power to lending institutions and bailiffs and severely limits debtors’ social, labour and privacy rights. We show how the processes of f…
‘I’m not going to feed the bailiffs’: personal bankruptcy and debtor agency in narrative accounts of struggling debtors
The article uses the formal instrument of personal bankruptcy proceedings as an illuminating context to contribute to the scholarship on the lived experience of overindebtedness. Through the analysis of 29 in-depth interviews with heavy debtors living in Czechia, we provide a focus on debtor agency, exploring how bankruptcy interrelates with how struggling debtors narratively approach debt and construct their capacity to act. We show that first-hand accounts of (planned) participation in a bankruptcy proceedin…
Consumption loans consuming homes: intersections of housing precarity and personal overindebtedness
Housing precarity as a condition referring to housing insecurity and unaffordability has been on the rise over the last decade across Europe and beyond. While various studies discuss the character of housing precarity and its links to (subprime) mortgage loans, the role of specific moral economies of debt in enacting housing policies which reinforce housing precarity is less developed in relation to other kinds of loans or the experience of debt enforcement. This article analyses fifty narrative interviews—t…
The Mobility Interview: Triangulating Interview and GPS Data to Explore the Role of Mobility in Everyday Life
This article presents a mixed-methods research protocol suitable for studying everyday mobility and its effects on life chances for a wide range of populations. We argue that it can address, among other issues, two important methodological challenges in the study of mobility: addressing pre-reflexivity and habits, as well as differentiating between voluntary and forced movements. The research protocol combines a problem-centered interview, two weeks of GPS tracking, and a subsequent mobility interview. …
Topics: Research Methodology, Migration and Mobility, Wages and Incomes, Age and Aging, Standard of Living
Out of Balance? Understanding Resident-Municipality Relations in Rural Peripheries through Ascriptions of Responsibility.
Rural governance increasingly involves a broad range of political agents – but whom do rural dwellers consider responsible for creating and maintaining local opportunity structures? Focusing on the issue of places to socialise, our paper investigates resident-municipality relations in peripheralised rural regions of Czechia and eastern Germany. We draw from problem-centred resident interviews using an actor-centred, multimodal concept of responsibility. Analysing residents’ ideals of active citizenship, mu…
Topics: Trust/Social Cohesion, City and Village, Care, Politics and Political Attitudes, Public Policy
The space behind the garden: Inconspicuous land-related care in Czechia
The article deals with the phenomenon of taking up responsibility and individual care for public land, presenting the stories of two Czech people who have engaged in their environments in such a way. Should we see these actions as moral interventions, transporting ideas of good care, decrying neglect and ill-practice by offering practical examples of more appropriate ways of handling things? Can we understand them as not only forms of everyday world-making (Postero/Elinoff 2019), but also as inconspicuous,…
Topics: Climate Change, Environment
Publication Type: Public event or educational activity
Department: Local and regional studies
![Kooperationen, Abgrenzungen, (Un)Sichtbarkeiten. Landevents als temporäre Akteur*innengeflechte moralisierter Märkte. [Cooperations, distinctions, (in)visibilities. Rural events as temporal networks within moralized markes.]](/images/drupal/obrazky/publikace/titelbild.jpg)
Kooperationen, Abgrenzungen, (Un)Sichtbarkeiten. Landevents als temporäre Akteur*innengeflechte moralisierter Märkte. [Cooperations, distinctions, (in)visibilities. Rural events as temporal networks within moralized markes.]
Rural studies have shown considerable interest in the implications the eventization of agriculture has for both rural communities and the agri-food system in the Global North. To contribute to the debate on the transformative potential of agri-food events such as farm festivals and agritourism, in this paper I present ethnographic evidence from a visitors` day taking place at the site of an organic smallholder farm in rural Western Bohemia. Attending to the network of human and non-human agents interacting dur…
Topics: Economy, City and Village, Regions, Consumption, Transformation, Lifestyle
Perspektiven einer Kulturanalyse des Ländlichen. Eine thematische Hinführung
The chapter gives a thematic introduction into the edited volume “The Rural as a Cultural Category. Contemporary Perspectives of Cultural Studies on Urban-Rural Relations” edited by Manuel Trummer and Anja Decker. It elaborates on the contribution of cultural anthropology to a critical exploration of the cultural categories “rural space” and “rurality” and discusses some of the potentials and challenges arising from the expansion of the fields and formats of cultural anthropological engagements wit…
Topics: City and Village, Regions
Das Ländliche als kulturelle Kategorie: Aktuelle kulturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf Stadt-Land-Beziehungen.
The book explores "rurality" as a cultural category. In 18 chapters, European ethnologists and cultural anthropologists discuss the methodological and conceptual approaches that can be used to capture and describe the ›rural‹ beyond generalizations, causal speculations and dichotomous thinking.…
Topics: City and Village, Regions
Kollektive 'Entwurzelung', 'kranke' Dörfer und eine neue ländliche Generation. Symbolische Distinktionspraxen von Lifestyle MigrantInnen im tschechischen Grenzland
Collective 'uprooting', 'sick' villages and a new rural generation: Symbolic distinctions of Lifestyle migrants in the Czech borderlands. The paper adds to the debate on rural transformation and social differentiation through privileged mobility and migration. Using lifestyle migration as theoretical frame, I explore the self-perception and symbolic distinctions of Czech academics, who have moved partly or fully from urban areas to a peripherialized region in the rural Bohemian borderlands. Their relocation is…
Topics: Culture, City and Village, Migration and Mobility, Social Inequalities, Lifestyle
The Ambiguous Experience of Motherhood in the Western Bohemian Countryside: Exploring Rural Gender Inequalities Through the Framework of Precarity
Perspectives from Central and Eastern Europe rarely find their way into the debate on rural gender inequality. In this article, I aim to mitigate this imbalance by exploring everyday arrangements of women with dependent children in a peripheralised rural region of the Czech Republic. Using an expanded framework of precarity that integrates different spheres of work, I demonstrate that in the spatial context studied, motherhood increases the social disadvantage women face while simultaneously constituting an im…
Topics: Gender, City and Village, Parenting, Social Inequalities
Living and Dealing with Limited Opportunities: Social Disadvantage and Coping Strategies in Rural Peripheries
In the article, manifestations of social disadvantage in peripheral rural settings in the Czech Republic are investigated. Based on the theory of local opportunity structures, the authors identify various aspects of the spatial context that intersect with individual handicaps of people and their households and contribute to poverty and social exclusion. Moreover, coping strategies of vulnerable rural inhabitants are investigated.…
Topics: City and Village, Regions, Social Inequalities, Standard of Living
Poverty and Social Exclusion in Diversified Rural Contexts
This paper is summarising the state of the art of rural poverty and social exclusion research and the current developments in the field, and it proposes new research agendas. In particular, the importance of further Europeanisation and internationalisation of rural poverty research is emphasised to reduce the bias and oversimplification inherent in the tendency to apply concepts derived from the Anglo-Saxon reality to other European countries. It is recognised that rural poverty not only constitutes a quantita…
Topics: Economy, City and Village, Regions, Social Inequalities
