In this chapter, I will address the main question of the volume — how rurality is being remade under globalization — applying to social imaginaries a conceptual tool that has already been introduced in the initial chapters. Following Kaneff I will engage with the concept of ‘positionality’ (position in relational space/time within the global economy) suggested by geographer Eric Sheppard to capture ‘the shifting, asymmetric, and path-dependent ways in which the futures of places depend on their interdependencies with other places’ (2002, 308). The advantages of this concept are that it is relational and thus captures the aspects of connectivity, that it involves power relations and thus can account for inequalities, and that it is dialectic and thus helps to understand the agency that both reproduces and changes its earlier configurations. While Sheppard has developed the idea of positionality in the context of economic geography, he has noted its applicability to the ‘space of discourse’ as well (321—2) and it is this relevance that I would like to explore further. I expect that the interdependence (albeit asymmetric) and optionality implied in the idea of positionality might also be fruitful for our understanding of the ‘micro’ level of everyday experiences and social imaginaries.

As Duijzings has argued in the introduction, postsocialist transitions have led to the exposure of the countryside to global flows and hence to the blurring and partial collapse of spatial categories such as ‘centre—periphery’ and ‘urban—rural’.