Cultural and creative work in rural and remote areas: an emerging international conversation

ABSTRACT

This article reports on the themes and trajectories of a multidisciplinary and international literature. It reveals how cultural and creative work in rural and remote areas has largely been examined and articulated through three storylines: (1) cultural vitality, that is, culture as a resource for community development; (2) the ‘rural creative class’, recently linked to rural innovation; and (3) rural creative economies and creative entrepreneurship in rural and remote areas. Over the past decade, these strands of discourse have become more intertwined in policy and planning documents, suggesting an opportunity for converging these discussions into a more comprehensive approach to fostering cultural and creative work in rural and remote areas. However, cultural policy directed to rural areas remains underdeveloped compared to its urban counterpart.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture-based development
• cultural work in rural and remote areas
• rural creative economy
• rural creative class

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Online resources include: Art of the Rural website (http://artoftherural.org), Atlas of Rural Arts and Culture (http://placestories.com/community/RuralArtsAndCulture), and an Americans for the Arts blog on ‘Arts Resources for Rural America’ (https://www.americansforthearts.org/blog-feed/arts-resources-for-rural-america), while events included ‘Rural Assembly: Building an Inclusive Nation,’ ‘Cross Currents: Art+Agriculture Powering Rural Economies,’ and Rural Arts Happy Hour virtual conversations.

2. This research on rural innovation rests on companies of five or more employees, which ignores a broad range of activities and production undertaken by smaller collectives and individuals.

Additional information

Funding

This work was developed within the CREATOUR project, ‘Creative Tourism Destination Development in Small Cities and Rural Areas’ (no. 16437), which is funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT/MEC) through national funds and cofunded by FEDER through the Joint Activities Programme of COMPETE 2020 and the Regional Operational Programmes of Lisbon and Algarve. An earlier version of this article was a keynote presentation at the Nordic Conference on Cultural Policy Research, held at Bifröst University, Iceland, in 2019.

Notes on contributors

Nancy Duxbury

Nancy Duxbury, PhD, is a senior researcher and co-coordinator of the Cities, Cultures and Architecture Research Group at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal, and a member of the European Expert Network on Culture. Her research focuses on cultural mapping, culture in local sustainable development, culture-based development models in smaller communities, and creative tourism. She is the Principal Investigator of ‘CREATOUR: Creative Tourism Destination Development in Small Cities and Rural Areas’ (2016-2020), a national research-and-application project involving 5 research centres and 40 pilot projects that aims to catalyze and develop creative tourism in small cities and rural areas across four regions of mainland Portugal.