Rural Futures: Development, Aspirations, Mobilities, Place, and Education

Abstract

This piece responds to the content of each of the articles in this issue and raises questions in response to some explicit and implicit themes including particularly the way that differently positioned rural youth are “oriented” in the course of their educational experience. These articles are read as accounts of people in place that confound and confront simplistic deficit assessments of educational paths, aspirations, relationships, and purposes in rural space. I suggest that this issue illustrates how rural education scholarship inevitably returns to the particular and to the material, challenging the hegemony of the placeless and abstracted neoliberal vision of education's aims in late modernity. The broad argument is that educational struggles and orientations in rural schools should be understood in relation to the crucial global challenges of sustainability and survival.

Notes

I am using the term “doxic” here in the sense that I take Bourdieu to have meant it. The term seems to be somewhat analogous to Gramsci's idea of hegemony denoting the large backdrop of taken for granted assumptions or the highly consequential ritual features of social life that are ordinary and seldom questioned or even noticed.

Following from my application of the term “doxic” the idea of neoliberalism is a loose yet ubiquitous formulation to describe the form of individualized capitalism that has become hegemonic in recent decades. The idea of neoliberalism represents a general movement away from both normative cultural traditions and from state structures and processes that support a social welfare framework. This shift in governmentality and the ideology of contemporary capitalist development has had wide-ranging educational consequences (Hill & Kumar, 2008; Lakes & Carter, 2011; Slater, 2015).

The PISA can also be read as a general measure of urbanization, given that less-urbanized participants in the PISA, such as South American nations and other non-OECD nations, tend to score at the bottom of the rankings.