A great place to raise kids : interpretation, science, and the urban-rural debate / Kieran Bonner.
- Title
- A great place to raise kids : interpretation, science, and the urban-rural debate / Kieran Bonner.
- Published by
- Montreal ; Buffalo : McGill-Queen's University Press, c1997.
- Author
Items in the library and off-site
Displaying 1 item
Status | Format | Access | Call number | Item location |
---|---|---|---|---|
Status | FormatText | AccessRequest in advance | Call numberHT453 .B66 1997 | Item locationOff-site |
Details
- Description
- xi, 241 p.; 24 cm.
- Summary
- "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 this question 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."--Jacket.
- Subject
- Genre/Form
- Electronic books.
- Contents
- Introduction: Parenting, the Urban-Rural Debate, and the Logic of Social Inquiry -- 1. The Problem of Otherness in Modernity: Sociology and the Development of the Urban-Rural Debate -- 2. The Urban-Rural Debate and the Hegemony of the Scientific Paradigm in Sociology -- 3. The Conceptual Predicament of the Urban-Rural Debate in Sociology -- 4. "It's Better Because It's Safer": Knowledge by Discovery and Knowledge by Interpretation -- 5. Hope, Fear, and Safety: A Problem for Parents and a Problem for Understanding -- 6. Parenting in Prairie Edge: A Rurban Experience -- 7. Smallness, High Visibility, and the Parental Life-World -- 8. Whose Side Does the Research Take -- the Community of Scholars, the Research Subjects, or the Phenomenon Itself? -- 9. Postmodernism and the Consumer Relation to Place -- 10. Understanding the Whole and One's Place in It: The Panopticon, the Polis and Radical Interpretive Sociology -- Appendix. The Radical Interpretive Research Approach to the Question of Rural Merit.
- Owning institution
- Harvard Library
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references (p. [229]-235) and index.