Interpreting Geographies of Poverty: Rural Gentrification and White Poverty in the American Northwest

本研究项目将研究产生农村贫困的社会经济力量和文化过程之间的递归关系，通过这种关系，美国西北部农村地区迅速中产阶级化的地区的不同居民确定了贫困和农村贫困。 研究还将探讨人们如何理解在农村持续贫困地区的高移民率和快速发展和变化的背景下的阶级和性别差异。 该研究项目将在三年内进行，并将使用定量和定性方法。 它将调查华盛顿、爱达荷州和蒙大拿州非大都市县和农村人口普查区的白色贫困和经济结构调整的模式。将比较以白色贫困或不平等程度高为特征的经济繁荣和较为停滞的地区，以探讨西北地区农村结构调整和贫困造成的社会和文化紧张局势的解决方式。 首先，将建立一个非都市县的数量类型，以表征重组模式。 然后，将使用深入访谈和焦点小组技术来研究阶级差异的具体表现和再现机制。 这项研究将联合收割机结合农村贫困研究的几个要素。 第一，它将利用关于区域经济和人口变化过程的文献。 其次，它将描述农村结构调整的政治经济学，并将这些分析描述与农村变化的文化层面联系起来。 理论目标是通过纳入文化和意识形态进程来扩大政治经济研究，以便更深入地了解贫穷和社会文化差异是如何共同产生的。 该研究项目作出了经验，理论和应用的贡献。 这项研究的重点是那些贫困人口中有很大一部分是白色的地方，因此贫困不能被种族化为一个非白色问题。 在这些背景下，该项目将研究如何在西北部经济结构调整和移民的背景下理解贫困。 随着城市居民向农村迁移，城市/农村的鸿沟变得越来越多，越来越有争议，因此，了解边缘化人口的定义方式变得越来越重要。 该项目还扩展了一个研究议程，政治经济结构调整和阶级差异的社会文化建设之间的递归关系。 对结构调整和贫困问题进行的地域分析将有助于实现以下目标：将文化和意识形态分析与政治经济方法创造性地结合起来，从而将文化因素和意义纳入界定农村贫困的政治和经济中。 最后，这项研究将为社区成员和决策者提供信息，因为他们正在努力解决贫困问题，并在快速变化的情况下创建包容性社区。

This research project will examine the recursive relationships between the socio-economic forces producing rural poverty and the cultural processes through which the poor and rural poverty are identified by diverse residents of rapidly gentrifying areas in the rural American Northwest. The research will also explore how people understand class and gender differences in the context of high in-migration and rapid development and change in areas of persistent rural poverty. The research project will be conducted over a three-year period and will use both quantitative and qualitative methods. It will investigate the patterns of white poverty and economic restructuring across non-metropolitan counties and rural census tracts in Washington, Idaho and Montana. Economically booming and more stagnant places characterized by either high levels of white poverty or inequality will be compared in order to probe the ways in which social and cultural tensions over rural restructuring and poverty are being worked out in the Northwest. Initially, a quantitative typology of non-metro counties will be constructed to characterize restructuring patterns. The specific mechanisms by which class difference is represented and reproduced will then be investigated using in-depth interviews and focus group techniques. The research will combine several elements of studies of rural poverty. First, it will engage the literatures on regional economic and demographic change processes. Second, it will describe the political economy of rural restructuring and link these analytic descriptions to the cultural dimensions of rural change. The theoretical goal is to extend political-economy research through the incorporation of cultural and ideological processes in order to build a richer understanding of how poverty and socio-cultural differences are co-produced. The research project makes empirical, theoretical and applied contributions. The research focuses on places where a large portion of those in poverty are white and so poverty cannot be racialized as a non-white issue. In these contexts, the project will examine how poverty is understood in the context of economic restructuring and migration in the Northwest. As the urban/rural divide becomes increasingly more porous and contested as urbanites move to rural spaces, it becomes ever more important to understand the ways in which marginalized populations are defined. The project also extends a research agenda on the recursive relationships between political-economic restructuring and the socio-cultural construction of class difference. The geographically specific analyses of restructuring and poverty will contribute to the goal of bringing cultural and ideological analysis into creative tension with political-economy approaches, thereby incorporating cultural considerations and meanings into the politics and economics, which define rural poverty. Finally, this research will be informative to community members and policy makers as they work to address the problems of poverty and to create inclusive communities in the face of rapid change.