Flora Cooknell (2024)
- Research Title: Living In a Postcard: toward a critical understanding of contemporary rurality in En
- Supervisors: Professor Matei Candea and Dr Paola Filippucci
Contact
About
Prior to Cambridge I studied Social Anthropology at the LSE, where I was delighted to be recognised by the department through the award of the Jean La Fontaine prize for an outstanding overall degree and the Michael Sallnow prize for the highest marks in an undergraduate dissertation. While at LSE I became convinced of the value of anthropological knowledge about Britain and carried out a research project exploring the caring contradictions at the heart of a rural community transport charity. For my MRes at Cambridge (2023) I built on this interest in rural community initiatives by studying how older women in a Norfolk village co-constructed themselves and their village through organised community activities. These experiences of rural research combined with a childhood and adolescence in an English village led me to my current PhD project.
Research
My research is centred around an understanding of the English countryside as a place of symbolic resonance to be navigated by those living within it. Through research in a village in East Anglia, I explore how different groups inhabiting the same space experience and construct the countryside and the village within it. This framing allows me to encompass many themes, including community building, rural deprivation, land ownership and use, belonging, and nationalism. By dissecting England’s ‘green and pleasant land’ I hope to provide critical insight into contemporary experiences of rurality as people maintain and navigate life.
Research interests
Anthropology of Britain; Englishness; rurality; the village; placemaking; relations to landscape; inequality; racialisation and whiteness; banal nationalism; commons and enclosure; kinship; community.