Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods

Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods

Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods

Edited by

April Mandrona and Claudia Mitchell

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mandrona, April, editor. | Mitchell, Claudia, editor.

Title: Visual encounters in the study of rural childhoods / edited by April Mandrona and Claudia Mitchell.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017033864 | ISBN 9780813588162 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813588155 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Rural children—In mass media. | Rural children—Social conditions.

Classification: LCC HT453 .M36 2017 | DDC 305.2309173/4—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017033864

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

This collection copyright © 2018 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Individual chapters copyright © 2018 in the names of their authors

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∞ The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

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Manufactured in the United States of America

April: To the children and young people of rural KwaZulu-Natal who shared with me their dynamic and creative ways of growing up rural.

Claudia: This book is dedicated to my first students ever—the junior high students of a rural school in Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia. You made the difference.

Contents

Foreword

Relebohile Moletsane

Preface

1 Introduction

April Mandrona and Claudia Mitchell

Part I: Images and Imaginings in the Study of Rural Childhoods

2 Pastoral Visions of Childhood: Selling Suburbia as Home in the American Countryside

Holley Wlodarczyk

3 Educating for the World Beyond: Challenging Idyllic Images of the Rural School

Jonathan Kremser

4 Nature Lovers as Nation Lovers in Canadian TV’s The Forest Rangers (1963–1965)

Jennifer VanderBurgh

5 Video Game Depictions of Rural Childhoods in the Global South: Get Water! and Ayiti:The Cost of Life

Renee Jackson and April Mandrona

6 Patriot Boys and Pioneer Girls: Christian Homeschool Texts, Gender, and the American Rural Idyll

Elizabeth Shively

7 Rural Girlhoods in Picture Books: Visual Constructions of Social Practices

Karen Eppley

Part II: Acts of Memory and Imagination

8 The Place of Girls? Collective Memory Work in the Study of Portrayals of Rural Girlhood in Swedish Child and Youth Literature

Eva Söderberg, Sara Nyhlén, Katja Gillander Gådin, and Katarina Giritli Nygren

9 I Am a Child of Back-to-the-Landers

Sheilah Restack

10 Pekupatikut Innuat Akunikana (Pictures Woke the People Up): Revisiting Innu Childhoods through Photography

Wendy Ewald and Eric Gottesman

Part III: How We See It: Children’s Participation in Studying Rural Childhoods

11 A Tale of Two Kindergartens: Visual Representations of Slovenian Children’s Daily Lives in a Rural and an Urban Setting

Barbara Turk Niskač

12 The Story of Peter Both-in-One: Using Visual Storytelling Methods to Understand Resilience among Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming Young Children in Rural New England

Sally Campbell Galman

13 Growing Up Rural in South Africa: On Using Cellphilms to Engage Children’s Ideas of Social Spaces

Naydene de Lange

14 Image-Based Research: What Does Childhood Look Like in a Small Village?

Irina Kosterina

15 Reimagining Rural Childhoods through Participatory Video and Global Education

Kelly Royds

16 The Perfect Computer? Children’s Experiences with ICT in Rural Colombia

Diana Carolina García Gómez and Helle Strandgaard Jensen

Acknowledgments

Notes on Contributors

Index

Foreword

When I look back at my childhood in rural apartheid South Africa, I often do so with a mixture of nostalgia and wonder. My nostalgia is for the many happy memories of playing freely in our big garden with my siblings and cousins and in the open fields with other children in my neighborhood. Competing with these idyllic memories are my recollections of my family’s struggles, which were characterized by poverty, long walking distances (for example, to school and other services), and hard work, even for children. With a migrant-laborer father, I recall the excitement of the weeks preceding his return home every Christmas holiday. Our household would be a hive of activity: My mother would make us clean the house and the yard from top to bottom and, on the day of our father’s arrival, supervise our baths, making sure that every inch of our bodies was properly washed and our hair cleanly cut and combed, and that we wore our best clothes to meet him at the bus stop. After the greetings and the presents, including treats from the city, our mother would gently guide us out of the room with let your father rest. For the entire two weeks of my father’s vacation, my mother would allow us only a few minutes in the same room with our father, this probably to enable him to rest and prepare for the next eleven and a half months he would be away working when his vacation was over, but also to allow them time together as a couple. However, looking back, I also remember the hardship, especially during the months that my father was away working in Johannesburg. I often wonder how my mother managed to keep us fed, healthy, and in school with the little money she received from my migrant-laborer father every month.

It is this rural childhood and the many happy and sad memories I have of it that led me to rurality and rural girlhoods as a field of research in my academic career. Apartheid has been replaced with a constitutional democracy in South Africa, and for this reason, one would expect that life for its citizens has changed for the better. Yet, as my work in rural communities and schools suggests, while the transition to democracy and the influence of globalization have to some extent brought much-needed development to rural communities, in many ways the lives of rural children have stayed the same. The various representations of rural childhoods that often emerge from the participatory visual methods we use in investigating different aspects of rurality depict childhoods very similar to what I experienced as a child. Where things have changed, it is often for the worse.

Thus, it was with much enthusiasm and anticipation that I received a draft copy of Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods. Questions racing through my head included: How have rural childhoods changed (or not) with globalization and technological and digital development? What will the various chapters in this book unearth vis-à-vis rurality and childhood in the different contexts through the use of the visual? My anticipation was also linked to my relationship with the two co-editors of the book, April Mandrona and Claudia Mitchell, and their work in rurality, childhood, and participatory visual methods. Mitchell is renowned for her international work using the visual to investigate social issues impacting rural youth and children in South Africa, Ethiopia, and other countries. She is also credited for introducing the visual as method to many academics and students in these countries as well as mentoring several cohorts of her own graduate students in Canada, among them April Mandrona, her co-editor in this book. Mandrona is an emerging scholar in the ethical and practical questions of creating artistic practices with young people in the rural South and elsewhere. Of particular interest is her focus on existing community assets and how these can be used to develop artistic literacy and make positive contributions to the personal and social lives of underserved children in poor rural communities. Her emerging work on the intersections between traditional forms of cultural production and new technologies and social media challenges our traditional interest in the visual by drawing from participants’ multimodal expression and lived experiences to explore the interaction between communicative modes.

As I started reading the collection, I was not disappointed. Visual Encounters delivers what it promises. Together, the two co-editors have combined their interests, expertise, and international networks to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars in virtual dialogue on the nature of childhood in various rural spaces. Using such visual tools as photographs, art, videos, digital stories, and others, the contributors investigate and represent the struggles and resilience of rural children in various contexts. Significantly, the book explores the lives of rural children from the perspectives of the children themselves and/or adults looking back at their own childhoods, or through media representations. Organized into three parts, it first uses images of childhood in the media and other digital spaces to critically analyze and challenge the often-idealized notions of rurality on the one hand, and the uncritical understandings of rurality as underdeveloped and in need of help, on the other. In the second part, the chapters explore the use of the visual as a tool for memory work to look back on rural childhoods. In the third and final part, it presents case studies of how children, through the use of visual and digital tools (including participatory video and cellphilms, photovoice, digital storytelling, and so on), can be participants and producers of knowledge about their own rural childhoods. It explores such issues as how children in rural spaces negotiate their sexual identities or their geographies, as well as their resilience in the face of the various struggles that they encounter.

What stands out for me in this book is not only the interdisciplinary approach taken in the chapters but also the strength-based paradigm the authors adopt in their analyses. Too often, analyses of rurality generally, and of rural childhoods in particular, tend to view these from a deficit perspective, with rural people and communities presented as in need of development from elsewhere (often from urban-based development experts). Departing from this trend, the various contributions in Visual Encounters manage to fluently present rural spaces both as characterized by poverty and related issues, but also with assets that can be harnessed to address these. Through the visual, the chapters present the ways in which children in rural spaces negotiate these struggles, and how through the resilience nurtured in their rural ecologies they effectively negotiate their lives.

Relebohile Moletsane

JL Dube Chair in Rural Education, University of KwaZulu-Natal

Durban, South Africa

Preface

As co-editors of the book, we share an interest in the rural that is informed by our personal experience of what it means to grow up rural in two different regions of Canada. April is the only child of back-to-the-land conscientious objectors who left the United States in the early 1970s to live in Eastern Canada. Until moving away to attend university when she was eighteen, she lived in rural New Brunswick on a five hundred–acre plot of land. For the first three years of her life, before moving to the so-called big house, she lived off the grid two kilometers from the nearest neighbor with her parents in a cabin built by her mother and powered by her father’s small-scale hydroelectric invention. The landscape and natural environment were, and still are, dominating forces in her life—simultaneously isolating and inspiring. April talks about her living in the countryside as a child: I think I had a strong sense of being far out [and] away from things, as we were sort of at the end of the line even though town was only a twenty-minute drive away. There just wasn’t anyone else close by. I think my understanding was shaped largely by the reactions of others. There was this sense of shock and ‘I can’t believe you live out here!’; for others, ‘Aren’t you afraid of wild animals?’ (in discussion with Claudia, October 31, 2015). April’s rural beginnings developed into a scholarly interest in rurality and visual production. Her doctoral dissertation explored children’s and youth’s development through art modalities and vernacular and heritage practices in rural South Africa. Current research practices extend this interest in the connection between visual culture and place as a generative force in her work with refugee children in Nova Scotia and England. She invokes methods of community art education to investigate theories and practices of rural development, the creation of solidarity across difference, particularly between people in the Global North and the Global South, and the challenges of working in contexts affected by poverty, structural racism, and systemic violence. April’s research focuses on identifying and using resources (materials, tools, techniques) that are accessible to participants in their surrounding environments, or on creating enhanced socially relevant literacy.

Claudia, for her part, grew up on a mixed grain and dairy farm on the prairies of Canada. She remembers vividly the cover and storyline of the book Bobbsey Twins in the Country, one she read as a child, but recalls that she did not identify herself as being in the country. As she observes now, I didn’t know we were in this idyllic place where a rich family like the Bobbseys with their two sets of twins and a maid would possibly want to visit. She became a back-to-the lander in rural Nova Scotia in the 1970s. There she raised, at least for a time, two of her three children as back-to-the-landers, along with chickens and goats. At the same time, she taught for seven years in a rural school in a small fishing village, her students the children of local fishermen, farmers, and forestry workers, along with a few commuters to the larger town, a twenty-five–minute drive away. Currently, much of her research is in rural South Africa and Ethiopia, where she focuses on the use of participatory visual methodologies in addressing issues of gender and sexuality in rural contexts.

In bringing our own experience of growing up rural to the editing of this book, we recognize our own partialities and, at the same time, acknowledge that there are many perspectives on rurality, including those of authors writing from outside the rural. For example, a Swedish colleague who was participating in a webinar Picturing Gender and Rurality, convened by Mid-Sweden University and involving colleagues in Canada, Sweden, and South Africa, confessed that for her, rurality conjures up an image of blackness. She recounts how she grew up in Stockholm and regarded the rural as being wild and full of the unknown. How does this memory of how she felt play out in her own research on gender, rurality, and sexual violence? It is perhaps not so much a question about who can write about rurality as one regarding what difference one’s positioning makes to theorizing rurality and childhood.

Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods

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 underfunding of black schools and communities) and resistance. As part of a student-led art-making practice, Mcebisi created a camera from scavenged wood (see figure 1.1). For him, it was important that he be photographed while pretending to photograph back the operator of the digital camera. Young people in this particular rural location rarely have access to technology such as high-tech cameras. In this image, the differences in form and utility of the wooden camera and the digital one are underscored. But through making his own camera and meeting the gaze of the photographer, and subsequently the viewer, he has positioned himself as not simply a subject of representational practices but also a generator capable of speaking and photographing back.

Figure 1.1. Mcebisi with his wooden camera. (Photo by April Mandrona.)

The Rural Idyllic versus the Anti-Idyllic

Notions of rurality and the associated place-based imaginative geographies hold considerable significance for revealing how children and youth construct their identities and understand their lives (Vanderbeck and Dunkley 2003). The idyllic and the anti-idyllic—the rural dull, rural deprivation and rural horror (Powell, Taylor, and Smith 2013, 117), and the rural idyllic, though boring (see also Driscoll 2014 on country girls), world of childhood in the imagination of children are two dominant representations of the rural in the vast range of children’s literature and popular representations. We consider ways of troubling or disrupting typically key themes in rurality and childhood. We ask: How does this imaginative space play out in contemporary childhood? What do we actually know of rurality and childhood, and especially its complexities and