Popular wisdom and many rural centres make the claim that the country is a great place to raise kids. But is it? Kieran Bonner explores the validity of this assumption by examining the epistemological, political, and ethical issues involved in the claim.
Bonner analyses historical contributions to the urban-rural debate by Karl Marx, Ferdinand Tonnies, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Louis Wirth, and Robert Redfield, as well as contributions by contemporary theorists, such as Ray Pahl, Anthony Giddens, and Peter Berger. He shows how both societal developments and scientific assumptions unwittingly shape the debate, making a distinctive rural culture more and more difficult to identify, and suggests that phenomenology can rescue the urban-rural debate from its conceptual predicament.
Through an analysis of statements by parents in both urban and rural settings, Bonner goes on to point out the limitations of a narrowly scientific approach to research, demonstrating how a more radical interpretive approach that combines phenomenological, hermeneutic, and dialectical analytic methods and theories can further our understanding. He argues convincingly that practical/ethical matters and theoretical assumptions are inextricably intertwined.
Review quotes
"This is a very readable, witty and ... poignant book. The epilogue is particularly moving." The Camrose Canadian.
"This is a provocative attempt to situate the urban-rural debate within a dialogue on the relations of social theory to everyday life. Bonner carefully and skillfully guides us through the thickets of contemporary discourses on the various approaches to the theorizing of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and dialectical analysis, bu showing the impressive attempt to join theory and practice." Alan Blum, Sociology and Social and Political Thought, York University.
"Bonner's book is the result of a Canadian study of the effect of
place on child rearing ... Bonner's personal narrative provides the backbone of a study to determine why residents of his new town feltthat rural areas are better places for children than cities ... This approach employs a radical interpretive methodology that has its roots in phenomenology and hermeneutics and will be of as much interest to scholars of the sociology of knowledge as to those interested in rural sociology or the sociology of the family." CHOICE.
"A Great Place to Raise Kids attempts something innovative and long overdue, namely, testing a taken-for-granted conceptual framework. The empirical investigation of the rural life-world in terms of its meanings for the residents of that world is a significant contribution to sociology. The study is also a significant contribution in that it extends as well as implicitly critiques investigations conducted in the past on regional and rural-urban contrasts in Canadian society." Rosalind Sydie, Department of Sociology, University of Alberta.
Kieran Bonner is vice president and academic dean, and professor of sociology at St. Jerome's University.
