Event overview
Dr Nick Osbaldiston, Visiting Fellow Sociology, Goldsmiths / Federation University Australia
Across rural sociology there has been a long standing and widespread debate about the nature of the rural and its relationship to the urban. Early thinkers such as Pahl and Newby opened up the discussion of the rural as a site that was perhaps not as distinct to the city as work from Weber and Tonnies might have suggested. However, amongst these and more recent accounts of the rural, there is a familiar disposition to include amongst the conceptualisation of rurality anything that is not urban. Consequently as this paper argues, coastal areas have often fallen into the same category despite at times being quite vastly different topographies and social environments. In this largely theoretical paper I begin to question whether we need to consider therefore developing a “sociology of the coast”. Using Noosa as a case study and a Weberian approach to the coast as an ‘ideal type’, I propose in this paper that the coast has had a connection to the rural especially in Australia but has a different biography that requires accounting for. In many cases, the move to a ‘consumption’ coast has been foreshadowed by the productive cycle of modernity. In particular, as new lands were sought after through the capitalist spirit, coastal places like Noosa became accidental by-products. As production continued and rationalisation of topography and the like accelerated, coastal spaces like Noosa began to appeal to the Eurocentric romanticisation movement which valued coasts for their counter-urban qualities. As we move further into a wholly consumer orientated coastline, the implications for this on the ‘social’ by the sea are stark and deserve consideration further and I argue, its own paradigm in sociology.
Centre for Urban and Community Research, Department of Sociology
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 24 Oct 2014 | 4:30pm - 6:30pm |
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