CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Bosch Profitos, Maria |
|---|---|
| Title | Women Making Sense of Rural P(l)ace |
| Summary | This thesis explores the gendered dynamics of rural depopulation and migration in Catalonia, focusing specifically on how women experience, interpret, and reconfigure rural spaces through different life mobilities. In the context of a long-standing process of rural exodus in Catalonia, Spain and Europe, women have historically been overrepresented among those leaving rural areas. This research engages with feminist geography, critical rural studies, and mobility theory to examine the narratives of women who have stayed, left, or returned to rural municipalities in Ponent, a region of western Catalonia. The concept of life mobilities—encompassing both migration and non-migration trajectories—is central to the analytical framework, allowing for a nuanced understanding of how place, identity, and movement intersect, and central for filling a gap on geographical characterizations of the rural to study issues of rural-urban migration. Drawing on qualitative methods rooted in feminist and mobile methods, this thesis analyses interviews, participatory walking, mobility diaries, and visual representations produced by sixteen women born in the counties of La Noguera and Pla d’Urgell. The analysis shows that rural space is constructed through diverse and often contradictory discourses. In the first analytical chapter, I explore how the sense of the rural place is present in women’s narratives on their life mobilities, and how those life mobilities reshape their sense of rurality. My analysis show that, for women who stay, rurality is sometimes experienced as restrictive and static, but also as a conscious choice tied to community and lifestyle. For those who migrate, rural areas are frequently framed in opposition to the city. However, returning women complicate this binary by blending urban and rural sensibilities, reimagining rural spaces of spaces with opportunities. I argue that diverse perceptions of rural space shape distinct life mobility narratives, which are, in turn, influenced and transformed by individuals’ evolving senses of place through real or imagined encounters with urban environments. In the second analytical chapter, I analyse the characterization of rural spaces as spaces of lack, stasis and death, instead of abundance, motion and life. I show how those representations are continuously negotiated, nuanced, and contradicted by the women themselves, who describe rural places as simultaneously empty and full of community, motionless yet shaped by mobility, and lifeless yet deeply alive through their attachment to the landscape. Ultimately, this research advances non-essentialist understandings of place as socially constructed by women and their daily and life mobilities and identity negotiations. |
| Supervisor | Fodor, Eva |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/bosch-profitos_maria.pdf |
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