Rural Community Exceptionality: Analyzing Discursive Cultural Identity Formation in the Qualitative Interview

Abstract

Using interview data collected from the case study community of Dinsmore, Saskatchewan, I examine how rural community members, in the context of significant socio-economic change, construct cultural identity within the qualitative interview. Sociological concepts of community and rurality are ultimately culturally evocative and embedded interpretive repertoires, which are discursively employed to achieve multiple personal and cultural identity projects. Therefore, I employ a critical discourse analysis, which analyzes how participants are concurrently being made into particular subjects by discursive practices, while also creating and re-constructing their own meanings of reality via everyday talk. I find participants privilege a very specific construction of ‘smallness’, as in small numbers of people, and ‘small town’, to make selves exceptional when compared to an increasingly urban social context. I argue by solely privileging a demographic construction of community, of vulnerable populations, gives participants the opportunity to construct sympathetic identities positioned as survivors of loss.