The remapping of rural digitalisation: A just-rural narrative review

Abstract

Studies on digital issues in rural development usually build on concepts that stem from literature on urban contexts. This urban dependence in rural research bears the risk of conceptual blind spots, and missing factors that might be relevant for the rural. In this paper, we present a narrative review on the development of 'digital rural studies'. We start from two earlier review papers that often serve as a departure point for rural scholars who work on digital issues. Different to urban-based studies on digitalisation that use a more generic social inequalities framework, rural studies acknowledge the existence of both urban-rural and intra-rural divides, as well as material and social divides. By combining the latest state of the art studies and our own experiences from digitalisation projects, we construct an updated narrative that helps to shape a more rural-just framework, and shows how the 'rural' and the 'digital' mutually shape each other. By applying the concept of remapping to rural digitalisation, we show that digitalisation is formed in, from and by place, and future studies need to acknowledge this.