EPISODE 5: Building a community foundation

This week on Rural Routes you can hear a conversation with Dr. Ryan Gibson, a geographer from St. Mary’s University in Halifax. One of the questions Ryan is interested in is:“What if rural Canada did not need any more money from anybody in order to have a sustainable future?” He thinks he just might have an answer.

Resources:
Ryan Gibson’s faculty profile
Ryan Gibson’s website on rural development

Rural Routes Partners:
The Leslie Harris Centre of Regional Policy and Development, MUN
Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation
Rural Policy Learning Commons Partnership
The National Campus and Community Radio Association

EPISODE 4: Getting smarter about rural with Bill Reimer

This week on Rural Routes, my guest is Bill Reimer. You could think of him as one of the wise on the Grand Rural Council if such a thing existed. Our conversation spanned decades of Dr. Reimer’s quest for finding better and smarter ways of thinking about and working with rural regions. We discussed rural policy in Quebec and Norway as well as intriguing approaches to rural and community development emerging among Canada’s First Nations.

Enjoy the show.

Resources:
Bill Reimer’s faculty profile
Bill Reimer’s website

Rural Routes Partners:
The Leslie Harris Centre of Regional Policy and Development, MUN
Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation
Rural Policy Learning Commons Partnership
The National Campus and Community Radio Association

This is program is supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Connection grant.

EPISODE 3: Rural Home and Childhood

Michelle Porter on rural home and childhood.

This week on Rural Routes I spoke with Michelle Porter, doctoral student in the Department of Geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John’s. Michelle’s interested in women’s narratives of home and the reasons behind their decision to make home in rural Newfoundland. What she found out, made her rethink what home is, as well as what kind of rural development we need to support parents and children who call the rural home.

Enjoy the show.

Resources:
Michelle Porter’s official graduate student profile
Rural Resilience profile

Rural Routes Partners:
The Leslie Harris Centre of Regional Policy and Development, MUN
Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation
Rural Policy Learning Commons Partnership
The National Campus and Community Radio Association

Episode 2: The Rural Soul of Canada

Dr. Ivan Emke says it’s time to take care of the rural soul of Canada. Ivan is a rural scholar at Memorial University of Newfoundland based at the university’s Corner Brook campus on the west coast of the island of Newfoundland. We talked about agriculture, rural stereotypes, the unsustainable nature of urban environments and the fact that neither of us could tell how long a group of academics could survive on their own.

Enjoy the show.

 

Resources:

Dr. Ivan Emke’s official faculty profile

Is Rural Life Worth Saving

The Leslie Harris Centre of Regional Policy and Development, MUN

Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation

Rural Policy Learning Commons Partnership

 

EPISODE 0.1 – It’s like driving in the fog.

The first in a series of shorts leading up to the launch on March 3.

A writer once said that writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. This is going to be a little bit like that. Except, we are on a country road, it’s night, and it’s foggy, and there is a blizzard with no snowplow in sight, and I still have all-season tires on.