A Sociology of Place in Australia

This book weaves a social, economic and cultural history of Australia with rare first-hand accounts of the lived experience of change related to farming and agriculture. It provides a rich sociology of how living on the land has changed throughout Australia's history. The book investigates the complex effects of the state on everyday life, using an historical agricultural case study of place to explore long-running sociohistorical processes of change examined through both a macro and micro sociological lens. This provides a multi-faceted perspective from which to examine economic, social and cultural transformations in each of these contexts and change is examined through multiple sites of expression: public policy and the role of the state; colonial processes of dispossession; social and cultural systems of value; economic change and its consequences; farming practices and lived experience; neoliberalism and globalisation and their social impacts; community decline and trends toward corporate and foreign land ownership. Each of these transformations impact upon lived experience and everyday life and this book provides grounded insight into exactly this relationship and process.

Provides a fine-grained historical and sociological account of the impact of shifts in the policies of the Australian state and the internationalization of its economy at the micro-level of actors' experience and of the dilemmas that macro-level changes pose in their daily lives Enriches our understanding of the material and localized effects of the political and economic processes that have shaped the contemporary world, and which are at the centre of contemporary debate across the social and historical sciences Uses intimate firsthand accounts to offer a uniquely grounded and authentic work

Autorentext

Dr Claire Baker is an academic, social researcher and author, currently appointed as Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Social Dimensions of Farming at Southern Cross University in association with the Australian Government-funded Soils CRC, and Adjunct Lecturer at the University of New England.

Inhalt
1: Introduction: Goolhi and the sociology of place in Australia.- 2: The embedded market: Place, space, land and the self.- 3: Groundwork: The social, political and cultural history of land settlement in Australia.- 4: Dispossession/Possession: Prologue to Moment One.- 5: Moment One The lived experience of soldier settlement at Goolhi.- 6: The Luck of the Long Boom: Epilogue to Moment One.- 7: Unpicking the stitches: Dynamics of change.- 8: Moment Two and the lived experience of economic action at Goolhi.- 9: Moment Two and its social consequences.- 10: Conclusions.