ARTICLE IN PRESS

0743-0167/$ - se

doi:10.1016/j.jru

Journal of Rural Studies 21 (2005) 1–2

www.elsevier.com/locate/jrurstud

Editorial

Reviewing rural studies

It’s a great pleasure to introduce myself as reviewseditor for the Journal of Rural Studies. In taking on thisrole I have set myself the task of creating a space forlively commentary on recent work circulating in andaround the ambit of rural studies. A significant part ofmy endeavor will be to carry forward the Journal’scommitment to reviewing monographs and editedcollections that reflect rural studies’ geographically andthematically diverse concerns, though like all goodreview sections, my aspirations for this corner of theJournal are not reducible to programmatic descriptionsof a self-confirming field. They rest on the belief that animportant part of review is to interrogate disciplinaryconsciousness in ways which—to paraphrase that well-worn slogan—’refresh the parts that other academicforms cannot reach’. In as much as I should dare writeof review in terms of a ‘unique selling proposition’, myconcern in taking on this editorial role is to foster adistinctive sense of style, content and immediacy. I writethis editorial to explain how I envisage the review ofrural studies developing around each of these concerns.

1. Style

While single book reviews will remain a major featureof the Journal, I am keen to pursue formats that mighttemper the simple precising of content. As far as mylimited network extends, comparative accounts of textsthat explore similar concerns in divergent ways appearto be well received, not least because they tend toencourage a more active, dialectical, sense of commen-tary. Moreover, extended essays that follow the threadsof work have an important role in challenging receivedwisdoms and evoking new styles of engagement, and Iwill be looking to develop the space for such kinds ofreview work. There are, of course, precedents within theJournal for this. I am exposing my own point ofenrolment into rural research when I state that as anundergraduate the touch paper was lit by that mosteloquent of commentaries by Chris Philo on questionsof rural otherness (Philo, 1992), and the wider debatesabout modernity and postmodernity that sprang from it.The implications of those exchanges have been widely

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felt, though lest we forget, the parameters in which theytook place were those of review. It is in this sense that Ihave asked that the section be hitherto regarded as‘Review’ rather than simply ‘Book Reviews’, in the hopethat the space for such engagements in the Journal ofRural Studies will be, at the very least, an explicit one.

2. Content

The conventional editorial task of soliciting andselecting bodies of work for journal review will also bemy convention, though I am interpreting my briefgenerously in making judgments over what might beconsidered interesting for readers of this journal. I amconcerned to sustain a review section that continues toexplore its rural ‘structures of feeling’ across differentintellectual histories and impulses, (from the humanitiesto the social-scientific) objects of study (from the textualto the material), as well geographical sites of scholarship(from Norway to y Novia Scotia [!]). In this lastrespect, the work of the Journal has tended to developits concerns around work in a European, NorthAmerican and Australasian context. The review sectionwill undoubtedly reflect this longstanding direction, andwill hope to do justice to something of the diversity ofscholarship that comes from it. To the extent that JRSmight account for work emerging out of differentlanguage communities within this broad geographicalframe, I am very much open to suggestion.

Alongside pieces that either in name or in vein squarethemselves directly with the sign ‘rural’, my eyes willalso be open to pieces that while ostensibly more obliquein connection, may engage rural studies in a novelfashion. This means nurturing opportunities for reviewof empirical inquiries whose frames of meaning im-plicate the rural even though they find definition in otherterms (such as Bell and Jayne’s (2004) recent editedcollection City of Quarter’s: Urban Villages in the

Contemporary City) or otherwise engage with thingsthat cannot be hermeneutically sealed within ‘planetrural’, yet nonetheless register with longstanding andemergent concerns (such as Harrison et al.’s (2004)recent edited volume on entanglements of nature and

ARTICLE IN PRESSEditorial / Journal of Rural Studies 21 (2005) 1–22

culture Patterned Ground). It can also mean engagingwith the language and premises of emergent bodies oftheoretical work (such as recent work on the ‘post-phenomenological’, the ‘performative’ and the ‘non-representational’) that seemingly gather momentum‘elsewhere’ only to appear, like an unannounced guest,on the conceptual radar of rural studies.

Finally, review can also plausibly mean engagingwith, for want of a better phrase, ‘non-academic’ genresof work, whether we are speaking of the novel, the film,the exhibition or the television programme. While itwould be fair to say that much has happened in ruralstudies to invite critical ‘outside’ inspection of thehabitual and everyday texts producing the rural, thepossibility of a more self-reflexive space to explain theen-culturing of rural studies ‘within’ has—save work onpositionality and auto-ethnography—remained unre-vealed. No doubt these habitual and everyday textsassert their influence. No doubt they help to make ruralstudies at turns relevant, critical, enjoyable and pleasur-able—in a word meaningful—to those creating them.But they do so in a silent and diffuse way. In thinkingthrough the possibilities of this section I would like totherefore think that the process of review should notautomatically discount these backshadows to ruralstudies. It is certainly another way we might thinkabout putting the discipline in conversation with itself.

3. Immediacy

What underscores much of the above is the feelingthat review must always also be an exercise inimmediacy, both in the temporal sense of ‘urgency’and the spatial sense of ‘proximity’. As a matter ofurgency, I do not mean simply prompt reportage, formuch as I might care to imagine this aspect of thejournal’s work as a ‘just in time’ process, the ink on thepage of a book has often long since dried before it entersreview. Rather, I mean urgency as in encouragingreflexive, instinctive and indeed, ephemeral, commen-tary on the complexities of work produced over muchlonger time scales, and with a good deal more effort.And why not? Review becomes a distinctive andinteresting exercise when it understands and evokes thisjuxtaposition. To my mind at least, a review sectionshould know that its insights carry interest because, inmanner, tone and longevity, it is quite different to thework being commented on. Even so, review is neitherentirely nor necessarily a wholly different system ofacademic production for, as an exercise in immediacy,review should always also be an effort to magnify howissues treated within given work relate to wider framesof rural meaning. This is what I mean by ‘proximity’.Alongside urgency, the currency of a review sectionrests, in part, on its effort to put work in its analytical

and conceptual ‘place’, whether this means through actsof rehearsal (in the sense of using commentary to pre-figure debates over the state and direction of particularavenues of rural studies) or ones of retrospection (in thesense of charting out work as the product of prevailingand longstanding wisdoms). It is through these acts thatreview is able to enter back into overtly more affectiveacademic discussions over the agendas we choose to setourselves, and the work that we produce within them.

4. How do we communicate?

All of this is well and good, though it cannot sustainitself on my acts alone. I will proceed in earnest withsoliciting pieces of interesting work, and seeking outthose willing in mind—and perhaps more importantlybody—to contribute to this corner of the Journal, but Iwould like to also express my genuine openness tosuggestions for review work by this Journal’s widercommunity of readers. The origin of our exchange mayreside in a book you are currently reading whoseentrance into rural studies may be tentatively imaginedwithin this section. It may reside in a body of work thatyou fear may be overlooked by my own dwarfish efforts,but which you feel simply must see the light of day in thepages of JRS. I come clean from the start on this point:despite my best efforts and intentions, I may miss atrick. And to re-emphasise an earlier point, it may residein less orthodox sources of review work: your reactionsto a seminar and conference; the product of conserva-tions in the corridor or the seminar room; your responseto the interpretive power of a film that you havewatched, or an exhibition through which you havepassed. I see no reason why this process shouldnecessarily preclude anyone who reads this journal andwho finds them self reviewing rural studies in their ownparticular and peculiar ways. In any case, I certainlycannot begin to pre-exhaust and pre-rehearse suchenactments, and neither would I wish to. Insofar asthe process of reviewing rural studies might be adistinctive exercise in style, content and immediacy, wewill have to do this together.

References

Bell, P., Jayne’s, P., 2004. City of Quarter’s: Urban Villages in the

Contemporary City. Ashgate, Aldershot.

Harrison, S., Pile, S., Thrift, N., 2004. Patterned Ground: Entangle-

ments of Nature and Culture. Reaktion, London.

Philo, C., 1992. Neglected rural others: a review. Journal of Rural

Studies 8 (2), 193–207.

Robert FishDepartment of Geography, University of Exeter,

Tremough Campus, Penryn, Cornwall, TR11 9EZ, UK

E-mail address: r.d.fish@exeter.ac.uk