Mapping Home and Away: A Critical Spatial Autoethnography of Schooling

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

Abstract

Speaker 3 brings her background in community-based change-oriented work to a critical ethnographic study of her own educational experiences. Answering calls from Kuntz (2009), Gildersleeve and Kuntz (2011), and Pasque, Carducci, Kuntz & Gildersleeve (2012) to attend to “the spatial” in equity-oriented educational research, Speaker 3 uses theories from critical geography (Massey, 1996; Soja, 1996; Lipsitz, 2011) to explore the “spatialization” and “racialization” of her own pathway to and understandings of higher education as a white, middle-class woman from a rural area in the Midwest (Lipsitz, 2007).

Helfenbein (2011) suggests “thinking through scale” (p. 321) as a way to map relations of power, and to understand the significance of places as “moments of encounter” (Gulson, 2007, p. 39) that shape people’s lived experiences. By mapping her own pathway to higher education through attention to space, place, power and identity, Speaker 3 seeks to help higher education researchers and professionals better understand “what spaces come to matter and what sorts of people come to inhabit such mattering spaces” in systems of education (Pasque, Carducci, Kuntz & Gildersleeve, 2012, p. 42).

Speaker 3, as well as Speakers 1 and 2, geographically qualify rural within the parameters of the United States. Although rural life exists globally (and complexly), Speaker 3 highlights the experiences of her own rural experience in the Midwest. Through a critical geographic orientation, however, she exposes and explores the complex ways that the processes of globalization and urbanization shape her own and other U.S. students’ educational experiences and connect them, systematically and structurally, to students (and people more generally) in rural areas across the globe.

Author

• Moira Ozias, University of Oklahoma