Making up the British countryside: A posthuman critique of Country Life's narratives of rural resilience and conservation

Through a close reading of a 2018 special issue of the popular British magazine Country Life guest edited by Prince Charles, this paper highlights the tension between its stated inclusive view of the rural and the exclusionary paternalistic-conservative politics pursued under this veneer. Combining a narratological method with a posthuman perspective grounded in the recent work of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, which undoes binary oppositions such as nature-culture and rural-urban by radically reconfiguring notions of agency, difference, and responsibility, we ask: who and what makes up 'country life' in the stories presented in the special issue, who and what gets to tell these stories, and which human and non-human actors are marginalised or left out by how the stories are told? Our analysis, which focuses on the special issue's engagement with notions of rural resilience and conservation, advances debates in rural studies about how to challenge non-inclusive narratives of the rural by: 1) highlighting the continued urgency of critiquing such narratives, especially when they appear in popular outlets like Country Life; 2) drawing attention to the way these narratives may be implicitly rather than explicitly exclusionary, which indicates a need to pay close attention to exactly how their politics of the rural is constructed; and 3) proposing that more intensive engagement with Barad and Haraway can advance the work of rural studies scholars who have long sought to think the rural as more-than-human.