Class, Culture and Belonging in Rural Childhoods

This book explores how rural children negotiate economic insecurity and difference. Based on long-term ethnographic research in rural Australia, it shows that children draw on class-based ideas of moral worth, anchored in racialised and gendered understandings, to negotiate financial hardship and insecurity. Through close observations in the classroom, school yard and the home, and interviews with diverse young people, their parents and teachers, Class, Culture and Belonging in Rural Childhoods takes us deep into children’s everyday struggles and their efforts to manage insecurity and belonging within a polarised economic landscape. This book offers compelling new analysis of children’s experiences at a time of rapid and far-reaching change in rural communities and the world at large. This unique and engaging ethnography of rural Australia makes an important and timely contribution to wider understandings of how children navigate the precarious circumstances of the present.

Rose Butler is a postdoctoral researcher at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University, Australia. Her research crosses the disciplines of Sociology, Youth Studies and Anthropology with a focus on class and culture, multiculturalism and globalisation, schooling and social change, and rural livelihoods. Her current postdoctoral project investigates the changing landscape of rural multicultures for youth. Rose is co-editor of the Special Issue ‘Asian Migration and Education Cultures in the Anglo-Sphere’ in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and has published with journals including the Journal of Youth Studies, Journal of Sociology and the Journal of Intercultural Studies. She has a PhD from the Australian National University.