Local Reading Practices of Working-Class Males from Rural Woodlands

The project explores what, how, when, and why working-class men in rural woodlands read, and in what ways their reading practices have been maintained and changed across individual lives and generations. How people use reading in their lives is strongly related to life modes, local identity, and belonging, and connected to dynamic ideologies and complexities of time and space across generations. However, current knowledge of how men in rural environments use reading in their everyday lives remains limited. The project aims to highlight continuity and change in rural working-class males’ local, place-based reading practices and to explore their use of reading when negotiating their everyday lives and constructing their identities across individual lives and generations between 1950 and today.

The project is grounded in a life-history approach and takes an ecological perspective on reading, emphasizing the relationship between individuals, context, and reading practices. Life-history interviews are conducted with three generations of men from five families living in the same woodland area. The interview material is linked to various forms of local historical source material in order to facilitate in-depth analyses of the men's narratives about reading and to relate these narratives to the history of the specific locality.

Through its life-history approach and ecological perspective on reading, and through careful consideration of the spatial and temporal dimensions and complexity of reading, the project is expected to make a significant contribution that may influence research at the national, Nordic, and international levels. The approach challenges reading research that situate rural places as deficient and risk downplaying the diversity and value of reading practices in rural locations.

The project offers both a theoretical and methodological contribution to reading research by enabling nuanced descriptions of rural men and their local reading practices in relation to changes in education and society. It may also contribute to interdisciplinary discussions on how spatial and temporal dimensions influence what, how, when, and why people read.