Recognizing Rural America Through a Third Space Reimagining of New Ruralism, Digital Equity, and Deficit Discourses

• In Event: When Rurality and Policy Collide

Abstract

In this paper, we re-imagine Thirdspace (Soja, 1996, 2010) theory as a framework for examining the complex digital equity issues confronting the digital learning opportunities of rural families of low socioeconomic status. At the intersection of home/school/community, rural families confront embedded spatial structures shaping their real-and-imagined opportunities to appropriate the digital tools and empowered learning practices needed to collectively transform existing hierarchies of knowledge production. Through geo-ethnographic methods, which combine ethnography with geographic information systems (GIS), we reveal spatial injustice as well as hidden spatial patterns empowered everyday digital learning practices. By positioning findings within a Thirdspace framework, we demonstrate the transformational possibility of our equity-oriented research agenda.

Author

• Anna Montana Cirell, Arizona State University - Tempe