Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents: Pathways in the sociology of rural knowledge -- Conceptualizing rurality -- Reconfiguring rural resource governance: the legacy of neo-libearalism in Australia -- Rural space: constructing a three-fold architecture -- Rural society -- Rural economies -- Rural policy and planning -- Landscapes of desires? -- Idyllic ruralities -- Variations on the rural idyll -- Constructing rural natures -- Networking rurality: emergent complexity in the countryside -- Non-human rural studies -- The Road towards sustainable rural development: issues of theory, policy and prctice in a European context -- Sustaining the unsustainable: agro-food systems and environment in the modern world -- Social forestry: exploring the social contexts of forests and forestry in rural areas -- Commodification: re-sourcing rural areas -- Agricultural production in crisis -- Neo-endogenous rural development in the EU -- Global capital and the transformation of rural communities -- Regulating rurality: rural studies and the regulation approach -- The State and rural polity -- The Rural household as a comsumption site -- Consumption culture: the case of food -- Tourism, consumption and rurality -- Gender and sexuality in rural communities -- Rurality and racialized others: out of place in the countryside -- Rural change and the production of otherness: the elderly in New Zealand -- Inclusions/exclusions in rural space -- Rural poverty -- Rural housing and homelessness -- Rurality and otherness -- Political articulation: the modalities of new critical politics of rural citizenship -- New rural social movements and agroecology -- Performing rurality.