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

这项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，通过文化过程，美国西北部农村迅速中产阶级化地区的不同居民识别贫困和农村贫困。这项研究还将探讨在迁入率高以及农村持续贫困地区快速发展和变化的背景下，人们如何理解阶级和性别差异。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地区的白人贫困和经济结构调整的模式。将对经济繁荣和经济停滞的地方进行比较，这些地方的特点要么是高度的白人贫困，要么是不平等，以探索西北地区如何解决农村结构调整和贫困带来的社会和文化紧张局势。首先，将构建非大城市县的量化类型学，以表征重组模式。然后，将使用深入访谈和焦点小组技术来调查表现和再现班级差异的具体机制。这项研究将结合农村贫困研究的几个要素。首先，它将利用有关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，并将这些分析性描述与农村变化的文化维度联系起来。其理论目标是通过纳入文化和意识形态进程来扩展政治经济学研究，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。本研究项目具有实证、理论和应用三方面的贡献。这项研究的重点是那些贫困人口中有很大一部分是白人的地方，因此贫困不能被种族主义化为非白人问题。在这些背景下，该项目将研究如何在西北地区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转移，城乡鸿沟变得越来越漏洞百出，争论不休，理解边缘化人口的定义方式变得越来越重要。该项目还扩展了一项关于政治经济结构调整与阶级差异的社会文化建设之间的递归关系的研究议程。对结构调整和贫困的具体地域分析将有助于实现将文化和意识形态分析与政治经济方法创造性地结合在一起的目标，从而将文化考虑和意义纳入界定农村贫困的政治和经济。最后，这项研究将为社区成员和政策制定者提供信息，因为他们正在努力解决贫困问题，并在面对快速变化时创建包容性社区。

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.