Intersectionality, Rural Criminology, and Re-imaging the Boundaries of Critical Criminology

One of the signiﬁcant shortcomings of the criminological canon, including its critical strands—feminist, cultural and green—has been its urbancentric bias. In this theoretical model, rural communities are idealised as conforming to the typical small-scale traditional societies based on cohesive organic forms of solidarity and close density acquaintance networks. This article challenges the myth that rural communities are relatively crime free places of ‘moral virtue’ with no need for a closer scrutiny of rural context, rural places, and rural peoples about crime and other social problems. This challenge is likewise woven into the conceptual and empirical narratives of the other articles in this Special Edition, which we argue constitute an important body of innovative work, not just for reinvigorating debates in rural criminology, but also critical criminology. For without a critical perspective of place, the realities of context are too easily overlooked. A new criminology of crime and place will help keep both critical criminology and rural criminology ﬁrmly anchored in both the sociological and the criminological imagination. We argue that intersectionality, a framework that resists privileging any particular social structural category of analysis, but is cognisant of the power effects of colonialism, class, race and gender, can provide the theoretical scaffolding to further develop such a project.

rich and powerful (Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1975), at the same time as distancing criminology from the power effects entailed in the selective criminalisation of 'disorderly' populations (the Indigenous, the immigrant and the poor mostly) (Carrington and Hogg 2002). 'New', 'radical' or 'alternative' were the preferred qualifying labels announcing this break in criminology in its early days. These key shifts in criminological paradigm were no doubt inspired by the National Deviancy Conferences that commenced in the U.K. in 1968 and its seminal texts including the ground-breaking works of Taylor et al. The New Criminology (1973) andCritical Criminology (1975).
Critical criminology in the U.K. and North America have dissimilar academic histories. Although in the late 1960s and early 1970s, some American academic sociologists were radicalized into the New Left, but unlike radical thinkers in the U.K. who managed to establish 'powerbases' in various polytechnics, critical scholars in the U.S. rarely gained control over an entire academic department. Where they did achieve this goal-such as at the University of California at Berkeley-the result was more likely the disbanding of the department than the establishment of a beachhead of progressive theory, research, and praxis (DeKeseredy and Dragiewicz 2014; Schwendinger et al. 2002). Unfortunately, critical criminologists in the U.S. have often been forced to 'go it alone' because of their operation within repressive political and academic contexts .
In Canada, on the other hand, while critical criminology may not be a core component of the broader Canadian criminology curriculum, critical criminologists are much more likely to hold tenured positions at prominent doctoral universities and to have like-minded colleagues in offices next to them. This is due, in part, to the fact that progressive ways of studying and thinking about a host of social problems are highly respected in Canadian sociology departments (DeKeseredy 2011). Nonetheless, we are witnessing the birth of a 'new Canada,' one led by a Prime Minister with sharp disdain for the arts and humanities. As well, the corporatization of universities and colleges is a major threat to critical thinking in both Canada and the U.S. (DeKeseredy 2013).
Despite being constantly under siege around the world, critical criminology is much stronger now than when Taylor et al. (1973) published The New Criminology. For example, the Division on Critical Criminology (DCC) is one of the largest divisions in the Amercian Society of Criminology (ASC). The DCC includes nearly 400 members, which is a 50 percent increase since 1997 MacLean and Milovanovic 1997). A number of progressive criminology journals, including Critical Criminology, are also thriving. Further, a series of monographs on key critical criminological issues (New Directions in Critical Criminology) was instituted by Rouledge in 2013, with one of the first in the series focused on Rural Criminology (Donnermeyer and DeKeseredy 2014). 1 As well, critical criminologists are frequently elected as officers in major professional organizations and some have received prestigious awards for their contributions to the field. That feminist scholar Joanne Belknap was the President of the ASC at the time of writing this introduction is solid evidence that critical criminology is gaining momentum in the face of rabid right-wing attacks on progressive ideas, people, and policies.
The boundaries drawn around the critical project in criminology shifted little for decades, at the cost of imagining other critical criminologies which tended to develop as distinct almost stand alone projects. Chief among these were feminist criminologies, public criminology, left realism, cultural criminology, green criminology, victimology, and rural critical criminology. However, rural critical criminology is arguably the newest of these progressive intellectual enterprises. Even so, we would be remiss not to mention here that the roots of this school of thought are found in the late Chambliss' (1964Chambliss' ( , 1973 seminal study of the original vagrancy laws (Coventry and Palmer 2008). Gagne's (1992Gagne's ( , 1996 feminist work on rural woman abuse played an important role in sparking contemporary critical interpretations of rural crime and social control. Shortly after came Websdale's (1998) Rural Woman Battering and the Criminal Justice System: An Ethnography. Still, the flames did not emerge until the latter part of the the last decade, with the publication of a spate of scholarly books, journal articles and chapters, many of which continued along the feminist path broken by Gagne and Websdale . Still, there is plenty of room for additional ways of thinking critically about rural crime, which is one of the key reasons for crafting this special edition of Critical Criminology.
This volume marks an exciting turning point in synthesising the above diverse threads of critical, deconstructive and oppositional intellectual projects, into a wider, more inclusive, expansive and empowering intellectual endeavour. The project is broadly intersectionalist in its theoretical approach, as it does not privilege any social determinant in the construction of crime problems. Intersectionality adopts a complex approach to researching how the social ordering of power operates in systems of criminal justice, and of societies in general. These include race, gender, colonisation and class (Burgess-Proctor 2006, p. 37). While many of those at the forefront of this debate have been feminist criminologists, (i.e. Potter 2014; Barbaret 2014;Carrington 2014;Henne and Troshynski 2013;Renzetti 2013), there is no reason why intersectionality cannot apply to research in rural and critical criminology. In this Special Editor's Essay we sketch the framework for this ambitious intersectionlist project pointing out how the original pieces published in this volume compliment other innovative research to re-envisioning Critical Criminology.
The first article, by Avi Brisman, Bill McClanahan and Nigel South 'Toward a Green-Cultural Criminology of the Rural' integrates the innovations of green with cultural criminology. It then sets out an agenda for how this could, and should include topics that previously had been only of interest to rural criminology. This piece builds upon previous work where the authors have previously sought to bring a cultural dimension to bear on green criminology (Brisman 2014;South 2014). In their contribution to this special rural edition in Critical Criminology, they expand this analysis through a critical reading of Franzen's novel Freedom (2010). Their critique highlights 'some of the environmental, political and cultural issues and conflicts with which a rurally-oriented green-cultural criminology might engage'. They argue that the way rurality is represented in this cultural text reproduces the dualistic and overly simplified representations of the rural. Without a doubt, this dichotomisation of representations of rurality has significant ramifications for the way in which crime and violence within a rural context is framed. Scott and Biron (2010) also argue that the cultural representations of rurality are important to contest because they reproduce simplistic urbancentric constructions of the rural. Films about characters like Crocodile Dundee in Australia, and Daniel Boone in the U.S., romanticise the rural idyll. Rural masculinities embedded in these cultural constructions associate rural men with the enduring qualities of landscape-as tough, rugged and stoic 'sons of the soil' (Carrington and Scott 2008). The 'bush', the 'wild west', and other monikers for so-called unsettled areas (i.e., unsettled by European immigrants) are today romanticised as quintessential national icons, upon which powerful nations, such as Australia, Canada, and the United States were born. The masculinisation of the rural, the dominance of man and mankind over women and nature, is represented as natural, and unproblematic. This effectively deflects critical attention from the visibility of environmental harms, as Brisman, McClanahan and South point out, such as those encroaching on rural landscapes and communities by mining, the pornification of rural women, and the normalisation of domestic violence. These are just three, but three significant challenges posed by the normalisation of the patriarchal domination of rural towns and landscapes . Other criminological ramifications of the gender order of rural communities are highlighted by several contributions to this volume, including Sanchez's analysis of hunting and violence against women in rural Ohio, Smith's ethnographic portrayal of female injection users in a rural village of Wales, and Beichner and Rabe-Hemp's examination of the difficulties of rural incarcerated mothers in Illinois returning to their hometown after release from prison.
In stark contrast to the idealisation of rurality, is the horrification of the rural as mysterious places where in-breds, something akin to Lombroso's typology of the born criminal, inhabit a perverted world of cults, drugs, and porn. A repertoire of horror films like Wolf Creek, Deliverance, Fargo (A lot can happen in the middle of nowhere) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Detective genres like Justified and True Detective (Touch Darkness and Darkness Touches You Back) reproduce these urbancentric representations of the rural (at least in Canada, the U.S., and Australia). This is what DeKeseredy, Muzzzati and Donnermeyer term the 'horrification of the rural' (2014, p. 179). The rural is mythologised as a strange place where naïve city folk who adventure into rural spaces as tourists or visitors risk ending up as sausage meat (as in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre). Instead of being idealised, these rural masculinities are represented as 'Mad men in bib overalls', ) who are sexually perverted, backward, barbaric, grotesque and deranged. They are more dangerous, weird, and strange than the ordinary urban criminal, who in cop shows like Minder or Hustle, steal to feed a drug habit, or swindle the naïve and the rich, but nothing particularly perverted. The urban criminal calculates and searches for vulnerabilities in victims and the right time to strike without getting caught. Such is the urban milieu, and within the diversity of city life emerges some who make a living through illegal means. But, the rural criminal cannot possibly be anything other than perverse because rural places are safe, moral, crime-free and the 'normal' people who grow up and live there are wholesome and law-abiding. Scott and Biron (2010) argue these are essentially urbancentric projections of the rural other. For them (Scott and Biron 2010), the cultural representations of rural horror invert the rural idyll as 'a source of fear and space of abjection' (p. 318), and invert the mythologised 'idyllizations of rural men' (p, 307) as well. Yet, this horrification of the rural challenges neither the rural as an idyllic place nor social constructs of idyllized rural masculinities because without the gemeinschaft qualities of an idealised rural, these polar images are impossible to create. Likewise, the urbancentric myopics of criminology today, with its theoretical obsessions and methodological fixations, becomes more difficult to sustain without a rural mythology which states that such phenomena as violence, environmental harms and degradations, and substance use and trafficking (topics represented in this Special Edition), among other crimes, do not possess a significant rural context. When crime's existence in the rural can no longer be ignored, then the reason must be the diffusion of the urban to the rural (Fischer 1980) and not possibly anything intrinsic to the essential, idyllic characteristics of the rural.
Consider also that there are class variations to the genre of rural horrification. The classic film in this respect is Picnic at Hanging Rock -an Australian film which portrays the mysterious disappearance of several private school girls from Appleyard College, in Victoria in the summer of 1900. It is as if time stops in the dead heat of the middle of day and the eerie landscape entices these girls into an adventure from which they are consumed and never return. In the process they not only lose their humanity and humility, but perhaps also their virginity and certainly their innocence-one of whom is last seen climbing a rock without her skirt-a heinous violation of femininity for a private middle class school girl. Clues of missing corsets and ripped lace later appear during the scenes for the frantic search. While some of the missing party who dared to adventure to Hanging Rock were later found in states of near death from dehydration, the disappearance of several others remained a mystery, as did the subsequent death of an orphan after being bullied and beaten by an evil head mistress, herself found mysteriously dead at the foot of Hanging Rock. The irony is that the casual consumption of the landscape as a place of leisure (a scene reminiscent of a romantic picnic into the quaint English countryside) in Australia, turns into a horror story, where it is the European settlers who are consumed by a landscape they presumed empty.
The concept of 'terra nullius' which means empty continent was used by the British to justify their colonization of Australia. It is similar to the nineteenth century U.S. ideology of 'manifest destiny', which at the time was used to justify both the forceful and illegal expropriation from Native Americans and the Spanish/Mexican territories (representing historically earlier settler societies) of land for territorial expansion and settlement of socalled 'wilderness areas'. Terra nullius and manifest destiny are convenient mythologies that dispossessed Indigenous populations on both continents of legal ownership to land and rights to citizenship. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, it is as if the 'empty' landscape strikes back, to taunt and haunt the European settlers, to unsettle their confidence in the Anglocentric view of civilisation.
A distinctive feature of settler colonies like Canada, Australia and the U.S. is that the gender order is typically more pronounced in rural than it is in the urban settlements, with fewer women engaged in public office or the politics of the public sphere (Hogg and Carrington 2006;Little 2002;Tickamyer and Henderson 2003). How this gender order shapes patterns of masculinity and violence in rural contexts is addressed in this special edition. While these issues have been prominent in the research agendas of the three guest editors, they have been noticeably absent from mainstream criminology, and its critical variants, especially those which tended to romanticise the delinquencies of working class masculinity as a mode of resistance to the social order. Hence another key innovation of this edition of Critical Criminology is a focus on how rural masculinities and gender are very much implicated in sustaining cultures of violence in rural spaces.
Amanda Hall-Sanchez's article, the second in this volume, is a welcome addition to this innovative critical scholarship. Her article analyzes the prominence of male peer support as a determinant of woman abuse (domestic and sexual violence) in rural Ohio. This piece is confronting and important. It adds to our understanding of how cultural constructions of rural masculinity reinforce and normalise violence against women and other associated abusive behaviours. The study is based on interviews with a dozen women separated from their violent partners. The stories are harrowing. She argues that 'Male peer support in hunting subcultures coupled with the availability and access to 'legitimate' weapons creates a fertile breeding ground for woman abuse in some rural communities.' The research highlights how rituals of performing masculinity in a subculture that worships weapons, hunting, pornography, and patriarchal domination-over nature and women-are formed centrally around drinking rituals. Other research in rural critical criminology has also pointed to the importance of male drinking practices in the shape and escalation of violence (Carrington et al. 2010). At the pub, men's work and drinking performances are heavily scrutinised and open to constant evaluation (Campbell 2006 p. 97). This is especially so for rural men where drinking practices are integral to policing the performance of masculinity in rural communities where alternative leisure venues are limited (Campbell 2000 p. 563;Hogg and Carrington 2006, p. 181).
Hall-Sanchez's contribution adds to the growing body of research conducted over the years and in a variety of places showing that male peer support is one of the most powerful determinants of woman abuse. Data presented by her and others (see DeKeseredy and Schwartz 2013) support what Lee Bowker (1983, pp. 135-136) said over thirty years ago about all-male subcultures of violence: This is not a subculture that is confined to a single class, religion, occupational grouping, or race. It is spread throughout all parts of society. Men are socialized by other subculture members to accept common definitions of the situation, norms, values, and beliefs about male dominance and the necessity of keeping their wives in line. These violence-supporting relations may occur at any time and in any place.
Cultural representations of gender and rurality are absolutely central to understanding the patterns of criminalisation in rural settings, and communal responses to female offenders. Gender is performed in rural cultural settings that tend to embrace more rigid expectations and stronger delineations between men's and women's activities. Those who violate those more rigid boundaries are susceptible to censure, ostracism and isolation. They are othered and marginalised, and they tend to judge women offenders more harshly than men. This acts as a powerful informal form of social control for policing gendered performances in rural social contexts. Two articles in this volume aptly illustrate this dynamic. The first is Catrin Smith's article on injecting drug use and the performance of femininity in North Wales. Her study highlights how socially embedded constructions of gender and place restrict the field of performances for appropriately acceptable femininity in rural contexts. Living in a rural community, female drug injecting users face a daily struggle to manage the performance of their femininity. They are 'out of place'-transgressing both gender norms and moral norms of a drug free rural way of life. Avoiding detection by others in the public sphere or community at large, as well as concealing their habit in the private sphere of family and close friends, they carefully seek out 'a space of familiarity and neutrality for themselves and their male partners'.
Dawn Beichner and Cara Rabe-Hemp's contribution to this special edition makes a similar point but with a different subject matter. Their study examined the multiple additional disadvantages faced by mothers who have been incarcerated when they return to rural communities. They note that the bulk of research on women's re-entry into community after prison focuses on housing, poverty, stigma and isolation experienced in urban settings. There has been very little research on these issues for women returning to rural communities, where they are not anonymous, and do not have the advantage of being able to slip back into an urban setting without visibility and intense moral censure. This article fills this void, drawing on interviews with 17 incarcerated women. Beichner and Rabe-Hemp examine these 'rural women's life stories and their narratives about their plans for returning home to their families and communities'. They direct particular attention on the vulnerabilities of this cohort of incarcerated mothers, and how their re-entry into resource starved rural communities is adversely affected by a range of structural and situational factors that restrict their access to work, housing, social support, and successful reintegration.
The problematic delivery of social services to support the victims and offenders in rural communities is a key theme emerging in rural critical criminology. A small body of research has highlighted how a lack of services also adversely affects the victims of domestic violence (DV) in rural communities. Findings from these studies indicate that resources and responses to DV tend to be context dependent (LaNauze and Rutherford 1997;Schwartz 2008, DeKeseredy andSchwartz 2009;Rennison et al. 2012;Owen and Carrington, forthcoming). Rural victims of woman abuse are faced with making a calculated risk of seeking limited support services which then increases the likelihood of exposure, ostracism and losing support from their personal networks in their local community.
Based on interviews with DV service providers drawn from two regions of Australia experiencing high rates for domestic violent assault, Owen and Carrington (forthcoming) argue that the peculiar architecture of rural life shapes DV service provision in several distinctive ways. Firstly, they suggest personal shame attached to being a victim of DV encourages rural women 'to be complicit in remaining silent about their abuse making it difficult for service providers to access clients'. Secondly, they argue that accentuated privacy of intimate relationships in rural communities 'leaves DV victims isolated and further acts to hide DV in rural communities, which again frustrates the objectives of DV service providers'. Thirdly, they illustrate using original case history interviews, that when women do seek external support,' the tyranny of distance between major service centres and where they lived hampered the effectiveness of DV services'. Lastly, Owen and Carrington conclude that the cultural and structural conditions of rural life creates distinctive 'obstacles in the implementation of integrated service provision, the model of DV provision adopted in urban settings'.
We have already described how romanticised images of rurality compresses the richness and diversity of rural life into an homogenising template, neglecting the existence of 'other rurals' (Philo 1997, p. 22). The romanticisation of the rural diverts critical attention from 'other rurals'. Robin Robinson and Judith Ryder in their article, 'Constant violence from everywhere: Psychodynamics of power and abuse amongst rural and small-town youth', reminds us that those who inhabit these 'other rurals' are vulnerable to harassment, violence and other forms of harm. Their study of teen dating uses psychosocial theoretical constructs to explore the 'dynamic processes that underlie behaviors of what we call youth relational violence'. They move away from a traditional focus on prevalence to interrogate the 'dynamic processes that underlie power, tolerance of abuse, vulnerability to perpetration and victimization, and degree of attachment as it relates to abuse and power dynamics'. Their approach avoids reducing adolescent masculinity to a set of essential traits associated with risk-taking. Their analysis of otherness in a rural setting is influenced by the psychosocial turn in critical criminology, and illustrates another way that the boundaries between critical criminology and rural criminology should remain open, porous, and complementary.
The psychosocial approach to gender and violence, pioneered by Gadd and Jefferson, takes into account both the inner worlds of anxiety and vulnerability alongside the outer worlds of power and discourse (Gadd and Jefferson 2007, p. 83). While the pressures of masculinity, power and excitement are present in the commission of violent crimes such as domestic violence, these elements are, according to Gadd and Jefferson, also present in lawful behaviours like football (Gadd and Jefferson 2007, p. 87). While still a contentious view, the unpacking of homogenising categories of rural men, bucolic images of rural life, and shifting the focus to particular frailties and vulnerabilities of context contingent violence (such as teen dating), is an innovative direction in critical criminology. This theoretical approach avoids essentialist representations of masculinity as sets of objectified characteristics. Masculinity is instead conceptualised in terms of tactics and performances played out in the context of broader strategic imperatives in particular geo-political and cultural contexts (Carrington and Scott 2008). For example, how frontier masculinities have been played out in mining communities has become a matter of increasing interest to critical and green criminologists, and almost all of this research comes from studies conducted in rural communities and regions.
While mining has long been recognised as an agent of environmental harm and of interest to green criminologists (Ruggerio and South 2013;White 2013a), less recognised is its harmful effects on localised patterns of violence, work and community life in mining towns (Carrington and Hogg forthcoming). Australia provides an excellent case study for exploring some of these mining impacts. Carrington, Hogg and Scott undertook a largescale study of violence in rural Australia. As part of that study they interviewed 142 informants across four case study localities. In those communities undergoing rapid socioeconomic change as a result of mining development, alcohol related male-on-male violence emerged as a key theme in interviews with magistrates, police officers, victim support workers, youth workers, and community service and health providers (Carrington et al. 2010(Carrington et al. , 2013. One the most significant changes has been an increasing reliance on fly in fly out (FIFO) workers who swell the ranks of the mining workforce, outnumbering local resident male miners (FIFO is also a euphemism for ''Fit in or Fuck off'' in mining towns) (Carrington et al. 2010). In these frontier settings, rivalry between men who consider themselves the authentic bearers of frontier masculinity-the quintessential 'sons of the soil', and men hired as transient workers for mining companies, can spontaneously erupt into violence. Rivalry over local women, the pool table, the dance floor, and minor intrusions into 'local space', are symbolic of the wider spatial invasion of transient mining workers. They are male imposters from the city who do not belong in the bush (Scott et al. 2011).
In sociological terms, these transient mining workers are the classic 'outsiders' (Becker 1966;Elias and Scotson 1994). Violence is one way of enforcing boundaries in the face of sweeping challenges to the traditional power brokers of mining towns where local men are threatened by FIFOs over-running their towns, their pubs, and flirting with their women (Carrington et al. 2010(Carrington et al. , 2012. Ironically while the conflict at a local level occurs between rival groups of men, the real power to change workforce dynamics, to hire transient FIFO workers, instead of locals, resides with globalised mining companies. The corrosive violence in mining communities is between men whose futures are in the hands of multi-national corporate giants who accept no responsibility for adverse social impacts of employment practices that divide the workforce. The recourse to violence in such contexts, is as Hautzinger (2003) argues, a reaction to a sense of a loss of power, rather than an exercise of power.
The article by Tara Opsal and Tara Shelley in this Special Edition, 'Energy Crime, Harm, and Problematic State Response in Colorado: A case of the fox guarding the hen house?' represents a welcome addition to the growing research interest on the criminological impacts of resource extraction. This is a topic that connects the concerns of green criminology and rural criminology, with the larger political project of critical criminology that shines a spotlight on corporate harms. Their piece examines 'the political economy of harm and crime associated with the oil and natural gas industry in rural Colorado'. Using an innovative mixed methodology, the authors undertook a study of registered complaints about mining companies breaches in the U.S. state of Colorado. They then complimented this study with interviews of those who filed complaints and undertook ethnographic fieldwork in the same location to verify first-hand the 'milky' contaminated water and other harms being complained about. The bulk of the complaints were about environmental harms, including water pollution and adverse health effects on animals and humans. Their analysis 'illuminates how the state documents these practices, how citizens experience them, and how the state dilutes and deflects the externalities of energy extraction to produce crime and harm'. Their study directs attention back to a traditional focus of critical criminology, the power of the state to define criminality, to regulate harm, or to ignore the harms of the rich and the powerful.
Landscapes are powerful cultural symbols. Imaginary rural landscapes are often contested and contradictory. We have already canvassed how on the one hand, these images conjure fear of the abject, mad men in bib overalls, and on the other, adoration of a bucolic countryside, a place of tranquillity and moral virtue. The grotesque, the brutal and the uncivilised violence of the Mafia, that operates its corrupting networks in part from seemingly impenetrable rural havens, is a cultural theme represented over and again in films like The Godfather. The article by Baris Cayli in this special edition, 'Renewing criminalized and hegemonic cultural landscapes', is a nuanced ethnographic account of the power of landscape to renew, contest, and reshape social order to bring about positive cultural change. His article provides an account of how the confiscation of lands, once used by the Mafiosi in Southern Italy, has empowered the Libera Terra, a civil organisation, to use these lands 'as a space of cultural repertoire to realize its ideals'. Volunteer labour is deployed to rekindle the landscape, to toil the land for the purposes of good-not evil, to produce organic wholesome fruit and vegetables and by-products. The transformation of the landscape is symbolic of the wider transformation in the social relations of power and the positive effect of the Libera Terra's resistance to the Mafiosi's hegemony. Baris Cayli's poignant analysis 'sheds new light on the relationship between rural criminology and crime prevention policies in Southern Italy by demonstrating how community development practice of Libera Terra changes the meaning of landscape through iconographic symbolism and ethnographic performance'. This is a thought provoking piece that illustrates how competing images of rurality co-exist and how rescuing the rural from organised crime, such as the Mafia, can have far reaching liberating consequences.
Elsewhere in the rural criminological literature, there has recently emerged research on illegal rural enterprises, including forms of organised crime associated with fraudalent food labelling and other practices that threaten food safety (McElwee et al. 2011;Smith 2013). Just as water quality is threatened by fracking and other mining practices, as Opsal and Shelley remind us in this special rural issue, rural criminological scholarship on the role of organised crime syndicates in the production, processing, and distribution of food, as Cayli's work so vividly portrays, is another reminder that an idyllic rural is a false ideal, which in the past, has helped prop up mistaken beliefs associated with nearly a century's worth of urbancentric criminology.

The Intersection of Critical and Rural Criminologies
There is an optimism in this analysis that reminds us of Elliot Currie's vision for transformative intervention that nurtures people to move beyond the individualistic, exploitative 'uncaring' cultures that infuse their lives and communities, and to relate differently to the world around them to nurture a less predatory and violent world (Currie 2013:6). One of the effects of transformative intervention is to enhance the capacity for critical reflexion and consciousness-or as C Wright Mills put it, to link 'private troubles' with 'public issues'. Another is to promote solidarity with others, to take responsibility, to support a non-violent world and to counter the rampart individualism that underscores so much violence, and as Currie argues, especially violence against women (Currie 2013, p. 8). The third element of transformative intervention is hope. Not blind faith, but hope driven by a desire to make a difference and that joining with others in a common purpose for social change, while not certain or inevitable, is nevertheless worthwhile (Currie 2013, p 9). This ambitious project, like the one we have outlined above, is driven by a 'criminological imagination' to think the unthinkable, to represent the unrepresentable, to shift the boundaries and imagine a more just world (Carlen 2010).
Clearly, rurality is more than a residual category for all that is not urban. The diverse patterns of crime and violence in rural settings is illustrative of the ways localised forms of social structure, social norms and related cultural patterns define people's experience with crime as both offenders and victims. To this end, we wish to remind readers of lessons learned, both old and new, which a rural criminology brings to all variants of critical criminology, with the full recognition that in turn, these lessons are themselves derived from the rich scholarship that is the history of critical criminology.
First, and most obvious, rural people and rural communities have never been and will never be immune from crime. This is what a scattered literature of historical accounts about crime in pre-industrial times tells us (Erikson 1966;McQuilton 1993;Roth 2012;Thompson et al. 1975), and which makes even more remarkable the shift to an urbancentric focus on crime during the 20th century. Clearly, what the accumulated scholarship in rural criminology has now demonstrated is that for certain types of crime, including those discussed in this Special Edition-such as many forms of violence, substance use and trafficking, and environmental crimes and harms-their occurrence is likely higher in more rural, less urban settings (Hogg and Carrington 2006;Donnermeyer and DeKeseredy 2014). And clearly, the occurrence of crime-no matter its type and no matter what official police statistics may say about rural-urban differences in rates at the aggregate levelwithin the cultural, economic and social contexts of specific rural communities, certain crimes may be very high. Conversely, some types of crime within specific rural communities may be among the lowest of any place, large or small. In other words, rural communities display a kind of variance in expressions of crime which ought to attract the attention of the most committed abstracted empiricists in criminological circles. But, as Weisheit, Falcone and Wells observed (2006, p. 14), 'studying central-city crime is simply easier than studying crime in rural areas', in part because the institutions of higher learning and government where criminologists work, including those who take a critical approach to the study of crime, are mostly urban-located. Hence, the Chicago School and an urbancentric criminology! Second, taken altogether, the seven articles for this special edition show the diversity of rural places, and by doing so, demonstrate an array of rich and deep contexts in which the application of critical criminological theories/perspectives and research can be conducted. We would argue that in many ways rural study sites are better able to reveal the dynamics of power, inequality, sexism, and discrimination-which historically have been the main concerns of critical criminology-because despite their own diversity, rural communities do share one common quality which makes them distinctive from urban centres, which is their smaller size . Hence, for many crime and criminal justice issues which represent the core concerns of critical criminologists, a rural milieu may the better way to go.
Finally, the articles in this Special Edition demonstrate the growing potential to critique and re-write one of the most influential theories in mainstream criminology, namely the theory of social disorganisation and its latter-day version, known as the theory of collective efficacy (Kurbin 2009;Sampson 2012). Rural places are contested, refuting the fundamental notion that disorganisation and disorder are the roots of crime, a notion, as we mentioned at the beginning of this article, which was also used to criminalise so-called disorderly populations (Schwendinger and Schwendinger 1975) and objections to which was one of the springboards for the emergence of critical criminology. This is what Cayli's work on hegemonic landscapes about the competing social orders of the Mafioso and Terra Libra was about.
But rural criminology, in partnership with critical criminology, needs to do more. We contend that it is now time for a 'new criminology of crime and place.' To the best of our knowledge, there is no well-developed critical perspective on community and crime which provides a comprehensive, alternative to the place-based theories of crime so deeply embedded in assumptions about the urban and the rural which are associated with the Chicago School. These seven rural-located articles show how we might start this new endeavour, because they reveal how power and inequality play out locally and affect people where they live, even though the social and economic forces which underlie them are mostly global in scale.
Concepts/theories in criminology, much like statistics, can themselves become so abstracted so as to lose their connection to reality. For example, patriarchy is more than a convenient word for an endless intellectual analysis of nuanced, conceptual 'hair-splitting' in the same style as the now antiquated theorising of Talcott Parsons was once debunked. Patriarchy is a real-life expression of the norms and actions which make many women the victims of violence at the very places where they live, work, and raise their families, whether those places are a sparsely populated countryside, a sprawling suburb, or a densely packed urban neighbourhood. The same can be said for all variants of critical criminology. Without a critical perspective of place, the realities of context can be lost. A new criminology of crime and place will help keep both critical criminology and rural criminology firmly anchored in the sociological-and by extension, criminological-imagination of C.W. Mills, William Chambliss, Stan Cohen, the Schwendingers, Ian Taylor, Jock Young, Pat Carlen, and Paul Walton, and all those other great critical minds on whose proverbial shoulders we stand upon today. 2 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.