Transition culture: Politics, localities and ruralities

Despite its high profile Transition culture is only beginning to receive academic attention. This paper contributes to this by locating Transition culture within a rural studies frame, highlighting the significance of rurality to Transition culture and reflecting on the nature of its politics. Drawing on interviews with Transition activists the paper explores these questions by focussing on Transition culture in practice. It connects activists' accounts and descriptions of Transition with debates about the changing meanings of rurality, the increasingly co-constituted relationship between rural and urban spaces and with the changing forms of political action which have been identified as radical and as post-political. The paper argues that Transition culture can be seen as a convergence of rural-urban values and practices. It suggests that this is possible because of Transition culture's avoidance of an explicitly political agenda, its reliance on more consensual driven concepts such as community and, related to this, its post-political orientation.