Moving home: narrating place, home, and rurality in Newfoundland and Labrador

Porter, Michelle (2016) Moving home: narrating place, home, and rurality in Newfoundland and Labrador. Doctoral (PhD) thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

This dissertation explores interconnected narratives of home, place, and rurality in Newfoundland and Labrador through three papers, each of which approaches the topic from a different angle. Through an examination of curators’ stories of the design of two exhibits in a provincial museum, the first paper argues that notions of home have excluded Indigenous ways of living and suggests a decolonizing framework that focuses on the movements through which home is made. The second paper examines rural Newfoundland women’s narratives of residential choice and, in focusing on their narrated experiences of movement, suggests that parenting is a life-stage during which place tensions are experienced, and that women are responding to rural change through the use of parenting strategies that include important narrative interventions. Closely connected to the idea of narrative interventions, the third paper explores some of the changing meanings of rural childhood that appear in women's narratives of home in rural Newfoundland and, in noting its important role in rural retention, suggests that despite an aging population the rural is a place narrated for the young. Focusing on movement, the papers together represent new approaches to examining connections between movement and the ways in which home, place, and the rural are lived and experienced in Newfoundland and Labrador.

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