Living in a postcard: community and inequality in the English countryside

My research proposal is to study rurality, community, and village life in a project conducted on a rural council estate in
the UK. The countryside is often conceived of as static and representative of 'old' or idyllic England, however it is of
course constantly changing, though often invisibly. Villages can contribute to, or constitute, a national imaginary and
identity. Studying these narratives alongside lived experience will highlight the gaps between these imaginaries and the
realities of village life, opening discussions of the 'real' and the unreal. I am interested in how people living in rural places
inhabit these imaginaries, as well as creating their own. This speaks to 'dark anthropology' as a lens through which to
study austerity and structural poverty. However, through focus on kinship, community, and everyday life, I also wish to
engage in the 'anthropology of the good' and attend to the themes of marginalisation, exclusion, and struggle through the
lens of community and the processes through which it coheres, and understand the ways in which people are happy, or
at least enduring, in a place. Central to this focus on community will be framings of race, space, and place, as they
intersect with the materiality and conceptions of rurality. Given this entanglement of themes and framings, I will employ
an anthropology that is uniquely able to engage not only with the struggles of rural life, but also the joys, connections,
happinesses, and laughs that thrive too.