The Marcellus Shale is a sedimentary rock formation that lies beneath most of Pennsylvania as well as portions of Ohio, West Virginia, New York, and Maryland, and holds one of the world’s largest natural gas reserves. It has been known that the Marcellus is a sizeable gas reservoir, but until the recent development of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, it had not been economically feasible to exploit it. These unconventional drilling methods currently used in Pennsylvania and other Marcellus regions are deeply controversial, with both experts and laypersons disagreeing over their threat to the environment and public health. The result has been great scientific and public uncertainty over the risks and rewards of Marcellus Shale development. This dissertation explores how Marcellus Shale development in Western Pennsylvania impacts the social lives of residents, and the ways in which residents respond to these impacts. In particular, I emphasize the social and cultural challenges of communities and how place-based meanings influence resident behavior. The data come from a comparative case study of two rural areas in Western Pennsylvania with differing intensity and duration of local shale gas development, Washington and Lawrence Counties. Washington County had its first unconventional shale well in 2004 and had 709 shale wells at the start of my fieldwork in October 2013. In contrast, Lawrence County had its first shale well in 2011, and had 20 shale wells when I began my research. Through multi-sited ethnography—which included field observations, participant observation at various public events, and open-ended interviews with residents and community stakeholders—I examine how variations in the duration and intensity of development may influence resident experiences and response with local shale development. This research finds that the main social and cultural challenges for Washington County residents were conflicts between old-timers and newcomers. Specifically, old-timers and newcomers experienced discord over the differences or perceived differences of opinion on local shale gas development. In Lawrence County, there was less conflict between old-timers and newcomers, and the conflicts that arose were often in response to the actions of outspoken anti-drilling activists. In both study counties, residents with primary ties to the physical aspects of place were dissatisfied with landscape changes brought about by local shale development and engaged in collective action in the attempt to change the way shale development was occurring, or to stop it altogether. While residents in Washington and Lawrence Counties had similar motivations for engaging in collective action—the protection of family, others, and home—they differed in their actions and strategies. Resident experiences with and actions toward local shale development varied between the two counties, which may be due to the differing intensities and duration of development. Washington County residents focused their collective strategies on encouraging local industry to conduct drilling more responsibly and Lawrence County, where collective action emerged at the exploratory stages of drilling, aimed to stop intense shale development before it began. The place-based variations uncovered between the two study counties raised important questions that warrant further study. In particular, is Washington County a unique case because it was the first county to experience shale development, or will we see similar experiences in communities with similarly long duration of drilling and intensity? How do counties in other Marcellus Shale regions respond to the occurrence of shale development? What other place-based characteristics should be taken into account when examining response to local shale development? / Sociology

This thesis examines a previously neglected aspect of agrarian social and economic history: the work of rural labouring women in nineteenth-century England. The subject is approached firstly through a thorough investigation of a variety of contemporary printed sources: parliamentary papers, census figures, journal articles, books and pamphlet literature. The general pattern of female employment emanating from this analysis suggests a continuity and in some sectors, an increase in rural women’s work opportunities and wages until the 1840s. Thereafter, the sense of decline in women’s economic participation is shown to pervade the printed literature. This ‘official’ model of change forms the background to an in-depth analysis of women’s work at a local level. A three county inquiry - in the East Riding of Yorkshire, Norfolk and Bedfordshire - constitutes the main body of the thesis. These counties all lay in arable-dominated eastern England, but the types and amount of work available to women varied significantly. The sexual division of work and wages, the importance of the family economy, the role of ideology and the significance of the lifecycle are all considered using farm and estate accounts, local newspapers, census enumerators books and autobiographical material. The concepts of work and earnings are used throughout in a broad sense to encompass the whole range of tasks women undertook in the formal and informal economies of the nineteenth-century countryside. However the nature of the surviving sources means that women’s paid employment in the formal economy of nineteenth-century rural England forms the main focus of the thesis. Women’s employment patterns are shown to differ according to the nature of the agricultural system, the method of hiring labour, the crops grown, and the proximity to industry in the three counties. Contrasts in female employment patterns, both between different counties and within the same county are uncovered. In conclusion, it is argued that archival sources also indicate continuity and perhaps a rise in women’s work and earnings opportunities in the period c.1790-1840. In the mid Victorian era the general pattern of women’s work shows a considerable decline from the early nineteenth century trend, and in the period c. 1870-1900, this decline continues. However archival research shows this pattern was not universal and the contradictions and complexities in women’s employment over the nineteenth century are discussed

Although there has been a surge of interest in a geographical approach to the study of children, there is a pro-urban bias in much childhood research. Childhood is seemingly assumed to be an entirely metropolitan experience; there is a paucity of research on rural childhoods. Few studies have investigated girls’ use of outdoor environments, particularly those beyond urban settings. The dominance of pro-urban and ‘malestream’ research tends to hide the experiences of girls living in rural areas. This thesis explores difference and diversity in the lifestyles of 10-15 year olds growing up in South Northamptonshire, employing a multi-stranded methodology including: a questionnaire survey of children; in-depth discussion work with girls centred on child-taken photographs and videos, and interviews with mothers. To try to get close to the lifeworlds of young people, wherever possible their voices are included in the text. The study area represents one type of rural experience - that of an affluent, commuter-dependent area. The theoretical constructs of liminality and habitus are used to help make sense of the use and social ownership of space. A series of factors is shown to interact in various ways to produce complex geographies. Contingency effects of gender, age and location create a multitude of rural lifestyles; there is no universal ‘country childhood’. Girls use and value recreational space in a myriad of ways. Young people often have to share their play spaces, and anxiety, tension and conflict between rival groups is commonplace. Girls and their mothers express concern about stranger-danger, gangs and traffic hazards, and this limits the spatial freedom of some girls. Mothers, deeming the private car the only safe form of transport, determine the spaces in which their daughters spend their leisure time. Rather than providing greater spatial freedom, the rural offers parents more control over their children’s use of public space

This diploma thesis "Changes in lifestyle in the countryside since the First Republic to the present" is a case study providing information on lifestyle changes in the last 90-years in the village Zavisice and causes of these changes. The substantial change affecting all others is moving away from agriculture as the main means of sustenance. The crucial processes causing the changes in the country life the lifestyle of the rural population in studied time period were collectivization in the 50th, socialization in the 60th, centralization in the 70th and 80th and transformation after the year 1989. This thesis looks at this topic from many angles, generalizes some conclusions thus creating a comprehensive insight into the lifestyle of the inhabitants of the Czech countryside in the last century. The contents of the largest in the text analyzes the transformation of customs, traditions, livelihood and leisure, children's games and duties, schooling, food, clothing, housing, change in approach to raising children, celebrating of the religious or secular holidays and family feasts, change of associations and interest groups. Information is gathered from the statements of witnesses, written historical materials (municipal, school and family chronicles, personal memoirs, newspapers) and the relevant...

This dissertation takes a sociological look at the relationship between urbanization and environmental change. While sociological studies on urbanization have long addressed the social dimensions of the built environment, the natural environment has not been treated as a primary concept in urban sociology. Based on an analysis of local land use change across the United States at the beginning of the 21st century, this dissertation brings the built and natural environments together, recognizing both as important dimensions of urbanization. The expansion of the built environment, through deforestation and the covering up of fertile agricultural land, represents a modern form of land use change with direct and indirect impacts on the natural environment, the most severe effects of which are seen in biodiversity loss, disruption of the nitrogen cycle, and climate change. Drawing on literatures and theories in environmental, rural, and urban sociology as well as demography and human ecology, the bulk of the dissertation involves empirical analyses of overall changes in forest cover as well as the loss of forest cover and agricultural land to the built environment (i.e., the impervious structures and surfaces that cover the land), a process I refer to as land use intensification. My dissertation project uses quantitative methods to examine the demographic, economic, and social forces behind this process in contemporary America. Hypotheses are derived from the various literatures mentioned above; to test these hypotheses, I integrate county-level data from US governmental sources with satellite imagery on land cover change from the National Land Cover Database (NLCD). For the years 2001-2006, I use the NLCD data to quantify three dependent variables at the county-level: overall change in the area of forest cover as well as the area of forest cover and agricultural land lost to the built environment. Results from regression analyses demonstrate that urbanization is a multidimensional process that differentially transforms the American landscape. With a focus on land use intensification, this study advances a sociological framework to address connections between urbanization and changes in both the built and natural environments.

Esta é uma tese sociológica sobre formas de assimilação social de novas institucionalidades para regulação do uso e acesso aos recursos hídricos. Busca empreender, a despeito do recorte disciplinar de sua problemática, um esforço no diálogo de saberes com os campos da economia, filosofia, antropologia, geografia humana, agronomia, ecologia e direito ambiental. Sua apresentação geral consta de uma revisão teórico-conceitual crítica sobre o princípio neoclássico da valoração ambiental e da apresentação de dois estudos de caso sobre os possíveis impactos que a política de valoração da água trará para a agricultura paulista. Na revisão teórico-conceitual, a tese discute a necessidade de elaboração de estratégias epistêmicas alternativas de interpretação dos modernos conflitos sócio-ambientais. Propõe a superação dos enfoques formalistas de modelagem da relação sociedade-natureza. Nos estudos de caso, a tese apresenta diferentes possibilidades de ajustamento entre distintas configurações territoriais - dotadas de relações específicas de produção material e de exercício do poder social - e os anseios do princípio da valoração da água. As conclusões gerais do trabalho apontam para uma crítica às intervenções institucionais de gestão ambiental baseadas em modelos universalizantes de supostas condutas racionais de agentes e/ou grupos sociais. / This is a sociological thesis about ways of social assimilating of new institutional inovations for the regulation of the use and access to water resources. It seeks to make an effort to obtain a knowledge dialogue with the fields of economy, philosophy, anthropology, human geography, agronomy, ecology and environmental laws. The thesis\'s general presentation consists of a critical theoretical review about the neoclassical principle of environmental valuation and the presentation of two case studies about the possible impacts that the water valuation policy will bring to the agriculture in São Paulo state. In the theoretical review, the thesis discusses the necessity of elaborating alternative strategies for the interpretation of the modern social and environmental conflicts. It proposes to overcome the formalist approaches of modeling in the relation society-nature. In the case studies, the thesis presents different possibilities of adjustment among different territorial configurations - with specific relations of material production and the exertion of the social power - and the aims of the water valuation principles. The general conclusions of the work point to a criticism to the institutional intervention of environmental policy based on models of suposedly rational bahaviors of agents and/or social groups.

This thesis examines the linkages between social protection and resilience to climate change among poor rural households. To date there is a very limited understanding of the potential role of social protection programmes in contributing to an increase in resilience of the rural poor with respect to climate change. An improved understanding of these links can help to build the knowledge base that is needed to help the poorest members of the society to adapt to the impacts of climate change. This gap in understanding is addressed in this thesis through a case study of the conditional cash transfer programme Oportunidades in two rural communities in Yucatan, Mexico, a region highly exposed to hurricanes and droughts. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected by means of household surveys, life-history interviews, key informant interviews, group discussions and participant observation. A social protection-resilience analytical framework was developed in order to guide the data collection and analysis. This framework is informed by a dynamic understanding of resilience, which integrates two resilience dimensions: the absorptive capacity (the ability to resist and recover from a shock) and the adaptive capacity (the ability to adapt to the effects of a shock). This framework is based on the proposition that social protection reduces vulnerability and, by doing so, this can also help to increase poor households resilience to climate change. The thesis found that the main role of Oportunidades is to provide a regular and predictable safety net that protects households from short-term risk, thus increasing households' absorptive capacity. The impact on the adaptive capacity of households is indirect and differentiated according to their respective poverty profiles. Furthermore, the research shows that certain features of the theory of change of Oportunidades, and its design, reduce the potential impact of the programme, creating trade-offs between the different resilience dimensions. This is the case because resilience to climate change and social protection literatures are derived from distinctive approaches, which frame vulnerability differently. The thesis concludes by making a case for social protection to be complemented by other interventions in a systemic approach that should explicitly consider climate change, in order to increase resilience and achieve sustainable poverty reduction.

This thesis is about agricultural intensification and the role of smallholder farmers in the future of agriculture in Rwanda. Intensification of agriculture has been the central objective of policy in Rwanda since independence in 1962. Over five decades, one of the dominant approaches to achieving this goal has been through mixed farming, i.e. the integration of crop and livestock production. However, despite continued efforts to transform agricultural and rural livelihood through mixed farming, many farmers have not achieved intensification. Thus, there seems to be a critical disjuncture between the government's vision of modern agriculture based on increasing levels of intensification and commercialisation, and the ability of many smallholders to engage with this intensification and commercialisation agenda. In this thesis, I argue that the disjuncture between the long-standing policy objective and Rwanda's rural realities poses serious repercussions to the rural development and the livelihoods of millions of smallholder farmers. I substantiate the argument by addressing the following question: “how does the integration of crop and livestock production contribute to agricultural intensification for smallholder farmers in Rwanda?” Firstly, I situate the research context within the historical development of agricultural policies promoting the mixed farming agenda. Secondly, I study two villages in Rwamagana district as rural and peri-urban cases. Various patterns of interactions between crop and livestock production systems are identified, characterised and analysed within the broader household livelihood strategies. Thirdly, I incorporate the life history accounts of farmers with diverse background and capabilities to engage in mixed farming to better understand the wide-ranging issue of livestock-based asset accumulation which is crucial for the crop-livestock integration. Finally, I discuss the implications for the government's continued efforts to transform agriculture and rural livelihoods through mixed farming and possible ways to assist many farmers who lack the resources required for intensification through integrated crop-livestock production.

O objetivo desta pesquisa é estabelecer a diferença conceitual trazida com a abordagem territorial do desenvolvimento rural em relação às abordagens tradicionais de apreensão deste mesmo objeto nas ciências sociais, a partir de uma análise histórica e teórica do problema. Na base da emergência do que se convencionou chamar por \"nova ruralidade\" há um deslizamento no conteúdo social e na qualidade da articulação das suas três dimensões definidoras fundamentais: as relações rural-urbano, a proximidade com a natureza, e os laços interpessoais. A tese que se pretende demonstrar é que os significados maiores desta mudança são, de um lado, a erosão do paradigma agrário que sustentou as visões predominantes sobre o rural ao longo de todo o último século, e, de outro, a intensificação de um longo e heterogêneo processo de racionalização da vida rural. Um processo através do qual o rural, em vez de desaparecer, se integra por completo à dinâmica mais ampla dos processos de desenvolvimento, por meio tanto da unificação dos diferentes mercados (de trabalho, de produtos e serviços, e de bens simbólicos) como também por meio da criação de instituições que regulam as formas de uso social destes espaços, agora amalgamando interesses que têm por portadores sociais segmentos originários também de outras esferas. / The purpose of this research is to establish the conceptual difference embedded in the territorial approach to rural development in relation to traditional approaches to apprehending the same object in social science, founded on a historical and theoretical analysis of the problem. At the basis of the emergence of what convention termed as \"new rurality\", there is a shift in the social content of and in the quality of the interrelation between its three fundamental defining dimensions: rural-urban relations, proximity to nature, and interpersonal ties. The thesis we intend to demonstrate is that the broader implications of this change are, for one, the erosion of the agrarian paradigm that supported the prevailing visions about the rural throughout the last century and, for another, the intensification of a long and heterogeneous process of rationalization of rural life. A process in which the rural, rather than disappearing, is completely integrated to the broader dynamic of development processes both by means of the unification of the different markets (labor, products and services, and symbolic goods) and the creation of institutions that regulate the forms of social use of these spaces, now amalgamating interests borne by social segments also originating in other spheres.

O objetivo desta pesquisa é estabelecer a diferença conceitual trazida com a abordagem territorial do desenvolvimento rural em relação às abordagens tradicionais de apreensão deste mesmo objeto nas ciências sociais, a partir de uma análise histórica e teórica do problema. Na base da emergência do que se convencionou chamar por \"nova ruralidade\" há um deslizamento no conteúdo social e na qualidade da articulação das suas três dimensões definidoras fundamentais: as relações rural-urbano, a proximidade com a natureza, e os laços interpessoais. A tese que se pretende demonstrar é que os significados maiores desta mudança são, de um lado, a erosão do paradigma agrário que sustentou as visões predominantes sobre o rural ao longo de todo o último século, e, de outro, a intensificação de um longo e heterogêneo processo de racionalização da vida rural. Um processo através do qual o rural, em vez de desaparecer, se integra por completo à dinâmica mais ampla dos processos de desenvolvimento, por meio tanto da unificação dos diferentes mercados (de trabalho, de produtos e serviços, e de bens simbólicos) como também por meio da criação de instituições que regulam as formas de uso social destes espaços, agora amalgamando interesses que têm por portadores sociais segmentos originários também de outras esferas. / The purpose of this research is to establish the conceptual difference embedded in the territorial approach to rural development in relation to traditional approaches to apprehending the same object in social science, founded on a historical and theoretical analysis of the problem. At the basis of the emergence of what convention termed as \"new rurality\", there is a shift in the social content of and in the quality of the interrelation between its three fundamental defining dimensions: rural-urban relations, proximity to nature, and interpersonal ties. The thesis we intend to demonstrate is that the broader implications of this change are, for one, the erosion of the agrarian paradigm that supported the prevailing visions about the rural throughout the last century and, for another, the intensification of a long and heterogeneous process of rationalization of rural life. A process in which the rural, rather than disappearing, is completely integrated to the broader dynamic of development processes both by means of the unification of the different markets (labor, products and services, and symbolic goods) and the creation of institutions that regulate the forms of social use of these spaces, now amalgamating interests borne by social segments also originating in other spheres.