Supervisor: Bruce Elliott
Research Topic: “The Farm Press and Rural Readers”
My study is about how rural Ontarians at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries constructed and performed an identity distinct from that ascribed to urban Ontarian. Farmers in particular saw themselves both as progressive, independent producers and as defenders of “traditional,” cooperative values. A key question in this study is the role of the farm and rural press in the process of constructing a “rural” Ontario identity and the degree to which the newspaper construction differed from or conformed to farmers’ and farm women’s own constructions.