'The Lives of Rural Girls and Women': Health, Underdevelopment, Gender and Sustainability (HUGS)

The HUGS research programme was funded by SSHRC through an Aid to Small Universities grant and also an institutional grant. The project’s title, “The Lives of [Rural] Girls and Women,” takes its inspiration from author Alice Munro’s work. In that early writing, Munro skillfully detailed some of the key elements of gender in rural life in Canada. Through this project, the RRC, as a small and regional as well as rurally-focused research centre, established itself as a key focal point in the region for scholarly activity and knowledge transfer on rural women: rural women's health, rural gender identity, rural volunteerism, and young rural women as vectors of farm safety information. Key research activities in the rural regional context highlighted the intersections and interactions of health, underdevelopment, gender, and sustainability.

Related scholarly publications and student training (master's theses):

Stiles, Deborah K. 2003. Rural Women, Underdevelopment, Health Knowledge, and Modernity: Women and Family Farms as Part of a Broader Context of Change. Anita Silvana Ilak Persuric, ed. Perspektive Žena u Obiteljskoj Poljoprivredi I Ruralnom Razvoju / Women Perspectives in Family Farming (Porec, Croatia: The Institute for Agriculture and Tourism, 2003), 130-35.

Stiles, D, Rangel, C, MacLaughlin, J, Sanderson, L & MacNeil, K. “Rurality, Gender, and Leisure: Experiences of Young Rural Women in a Nova Scotia Community.” Journal of Rural Community Psychology E 10 (2) Fall 2007. URL: http://www.marshall.edu/jrcp/V10%20N2/stiles.pdf.

Heather Levie, M.A. (English) Dalhousie University. Thesis: “Trouble at Home:
The Anxiety of Belonging in the Fiction of Lynn Coady and Christy Ann Conlin.” 2008. Co-Supervised by Deborah Stiles.

Carmen Reems, M.A. (English) Dalhousie University. Thesis: Explorations of
Racism and Media in Black Canadian Fiction.” 2008. Co-supervised by Deborah Stiles.

Stiles, Deborah. “From Margins to Margins: Cultural Integrity, Ecological Survival and Future Transcripts
in the Historical Home-Based Health Narratives of Nova Scotia and West Virginia.” Probing the Boundaries [Environmental Justice and Global Citizenship]. 7th Global Conference, Inter-Disciplinary Net. Mansfield College, Oxford, England. 11 July 2008. Online: http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/ptb/ejgc/ejgc7/stiles%20paper.pdf.

Stiles, Deborah. ‘Butter the size of a walnut’ :West Virginia Food and Folklore--and Changes in Rural Women’s Health?. West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies (accepted, April 2008; currently under revision).

Sanderson, Lauranne, Steven Dukeshire, and Renee Garbes. “The Farm Apprentice: Agricultural College Students’ Recollections of Learning to Farm ‘Safely.’ Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health (forthcoming)