Rural voters in the US, UK, and Europe are turning to disruptive political movements—from Brexit to Trump’s election to right-wing populist parties—yet researchers still do not fully understand why rural discontent translates into political upheaval. This project addresses a gap: existing studies on populism and political disruption are fragmented, often ignoring the role of spatial injustice—the sense that rural areas are systematically overlooked or treated unfairly. The research will examine how perceptions of inequality, combined with material disadvantages, fuel support for disruptive politics in the UK, Europe, and US states like Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It uses a mix of statistical analysis, surveys, interviews, ethnography, and participatory research to capture both hard data and lived experience. If successful, the work could reshape how policymakers and political parties understand rural grievances—moving beyond stereotypes of “left-behind” communities to identify specific, actionable drivers of discontent. This might inform more equitable regional investment, infrastructure planning, or political engagement strategies that reduce polarisation. The project is primarily fundamental social science, but its findings could directly affect how governments design rural policy and how political campaigns address spatial inequality.
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From the election of Donald Trump to Brexit to rises in support for populist and right-wing parties in Europe and elsewhere, recent years have witnessed disruptive political movements and events that have commonly been presented as involving urban-rural or core-periphery polarization and drawing support from marginalized rural populations. Yet research examining disruptive politics is fragmented and partial and reveals significant gaps in our understanding of connections between rural discontent and disruptive political movements, the geographies of mobilization and significance of material and perceived inequalities. RuralSpatialJustice aims to establish how rural discontent and perceptions of spatial injustice have shaped dynamics of disruptive politics, to investigate the consequences for social relations within rural localities, and to advance the study of electoral geographies through new conceptual perspectives and methodological approaches. RuralSpatialJustice develops a novel spatial justice framework to analyse the factors contributing to disruptive politics and employs a mixed-methods strategy combining statistical analysis, GIS, large-scale survey, ethnography, interviews, textual analysis and participatory research. In order to elaborate a holistic, comparative perspective, RuralSpatialJustice examines case studies in the UK, Europe and the US states of Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin within a nested scale approach, including examples of electoral and non-electoral mobilization. RuralSpatialJustice seeks to recognize the diversity of rural societies, engaging with marginalized communities to explore their perceptions of (in)justice and how these have wider political and societal consequences through articulation in disruptive political movements and events, and investigating possibilities for fairer, more inclusive futures.
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