Abstrakt
Village of the Year is a national competition announced each year by Ministry of Regional Development of Czech Republic since 1995. Its aim is to initiate restoration and development of Czech countryside through the communal projects carried out by village inhabitants themselves.
Each year around 200 Czech and Moravian villages enter this competition. Since this project is focused on the countryside, it is inevitably connected with the notion of rurality as one its defining features.
But what kind of rurality is it? What are its constituents? How it is performed in individual projects? And what are the sources of its forms? In our paper, we will try to identify and describe the discourses of rurality interwoven in the representations of villages created for the competition. Through these questions we would like to find out how these discourses operates and how they re-create the "ideal" villages that should be seen as a models to be followed.
Our paper will be based on analysis of media representations of villages engaged in the competition (web sites, video presentations, etc.), alongside with materials provided for competitors by Ministry and other participating organizations (rules of the competition, official documents, etc.) and various media representations concerning the competition (TV spots, etc.).