The essays are not just attempts to redescribe the changing rural scene; they are also attempts to understand changes as part of a wider cultural problem: the location of the rural as the subject and object of new meanings, conventions and strategies of dissemination. As essays they are not exhaustive but they do begin to address these new kinds of rural geographies. David Matless essay shows how a Foucaultian approach to discourses of identity and Englishness can rescue the English village from being consigned to the dustbin of ideology and can, at the same time, set it in motion showing that it consists of complex multiple echoes rather than a fixed and immutable category. Martin Phillips essay outlines some aspects of Habermas work and places particular emphasis on exploring the implications of his concepts of public and private sphere and his arguments over language, knowledge and power. He uses reformulations of these concepts and arguments to write new interpretations of the rural and seeks to preserve a critical impulse in rural studies when doing so. Marcus Doels essay is self-conscious in its attempt to use Derridean traces to uncover what takes place at the limit of ideas of the world as text. In attempting to problematize representation, Doel is concerned to show how deconstructive writing can constantly withhold the meaning of the rural, turning it into a heterotextual assemblage that never stops. Paul Clokes essay is part of the self-reflective turn in contemporary cultural studies.

Writers like Steedman and Probyn have pondered on the degree and the ways in which the self can be introduced into writing. Cloke uses his own self-accounting as a way of interrogating what he has written about the rural, and seeks to understand why he is concerned to retain elements of the structuring of opportunities alongside the experiencing of lifestyle in his accounts of how political economy can be (en)cultured. Nigel Thrifts essay draws on literature relating to social and cultural theory around boundaries, to actor-network theory, and to poststructuralism, to show that these simultaneously inform and are the result of an historical accretion of different kinds of socio-technology. He not only problematizes the rural as a fixed and stable construct, but he also shows how the construction of new inhuman communities may well become the normal currency of everyday life.