Rural geographical research: working in rural places and with rural communities

ABSTRACT

Across a number of disciplines at the University of Aberdeen, there is a long tradition of research focused upon the interrogation of issues associated with rural places and rural communities. Since the mid-1960s, rural geographical research has been a prominent component of the research undertaken by academic staff in Geography. Drawing upon an analysis of the large corpus of ‘rural’ publications arising from this scholarly enterprise, this paper presents a chronologically structured overview of how rural geographical research at Aberdeen has reflected developments in, and contributed to, the evolution of the sub-discipline of rural geography.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural geographies
• University of Aberdeen

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Lorna J. Philip http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4788-2798

Andrew S. Maclaren http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6185-9167

Notes

1 Many other researchers including, for example, those employed as Research Fellows or undertaking doctoral research, have made contributions to Aberdeen’s corpus of rural geographical scholarship. This work is not referred to in this contribution due to the difficulty of compiling an accurate list of all those individuals who have undertaken research degrees or held research positions over the past 50 years or so. The contributions of these staff and research students, and that of their contemporaries working in St Mary’s at the time of writing this article, to the vibrancy of rural research in Geography at Aberdeen has been and continues to be considerable.

2 The Arkleton Institute’s web pages were archived in 2014. The authors acknowledge the help provided by Debbie Hay in Aberdeen University’s IT services web team who extracted a copy of this archived content for us which provided much of the detail reported here.