Writing Rural: Critical Perspectives on Rural Students and the College-Going Experience

• In Event: Critical Considerations of Space and Place: Rural Student Experiences and Higher Education Opportunities

Abstract

Employing frameworks of critical feminist theory and critical rural theory, Speaker 1’s current research engages with the college going process, specifically for rural students. Similar to other student populations, there are challenges to studying rural students. One of the main challenges of studying rural students, as well as their college going practices, is defining and providing a context for “rural.” Speaker 1 explores three themes found in the literature related to the definition of rural – those being, defining in opposition, defining as deficit, and defining in multiplicity. Many conceptions of rural define such spaces in opposition to urban—as “not urban”—and as deficient because of this (Donehower, et al., 2007; McDonough, Gildersleeve & Jarsky, 2010). By doing so, such discourses of “the rural” reinscribe a hegemonic binary similar to the binaries of black-white, male-female, and straight-gay. Critical race, postcolonial feminist, and queer scholars question such binaries and the ways that they create monolithic, history-less, and deficient “others” (Collins, 1990; Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Mohanty, 1988; Renn, 2010). Donehower et al. (2007) respond to such discourses, however, and challenge scholars to define rural in more complex and multi-faceted ways that include quantitative, geographic, and cultural dimensions.

Speaker 1 takes up this challenge, focusing on the ways in which higher education scholarship has framed rural students within the context of post-secondary educational opportunity. She argues as to how opportunities for post-secondary education operate and present themselves differently within rural communities and for rural people. Utilizing feminist methodologies, Speaker 1 draws on her own experiences as a student from a rural, Southern community to uncover important nuances and dimensions of the pathways toward college-going for rural students.

Author

• Kathleen E. Gillon, Iowa State University