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.
