Rural inequalities in Britain: Undisciplining rural histories/connected histories and collaborative methods
Alf Ellis, Ben Garlick, George J. Severs, Julie-Marie Strange, Yvette Taylor, Annie Tindley, Imogen Tyler, Clare WhistlerAbstract
This article asks what would happen if scholars from a broad range of disciplines began to work together to think about, first, what histories of class look like in a rural context and, secondly, whether working in a more holistic way might generate new historical perspectives on the shape and persistence of rural inequalities in Britain. It is structured around three problems and methodological provocations that range across disciplines, genres, voices, and perspectives, as it scopes creative and collaborative methods that might disrupt the assumptions that underpin our understandings of the multivarious ways in which histories of inequality have shaped and continue to shape unequal access to resources in the present. It asks what methods we might use to produce more diverse, place-based histories of the rural that surface the spectrum of violences and injustices that take place around resource and rights distributions in the rural context.