Delineations of "Truth" and Context in Rural Wisconsin

• In Event: 61.022 - (Un)Masking Ruralities: By Whom and for What?

Abstract

Critical rural scholarship (Roberts & Cuervo, 2016) is concerned with social justice and educational equity, and thus it remains a research imperative to challenge the ethical guidelines that anonymize and erase the lived experiences of people in rural communities. As this year’s AERA call indicates, ethical research requires us to engage with and make sense of the multiplicity of truths in contemporary society. Methodologically, my paper proposes that place and context anonymization may serve the interests of researchers and policymakers, but does not always fit with the realities and truths of rural residents and communities.
Since places are socially constructed through people’s everyday lives and larger economic, social, cultural, and political forces (Harvey, 2006; Smith, 2008; Soja, 2010) they cannot be considered neutral or unproblematic in educational discourse. Through the examination of boundaries, central and peripheral spaces, and spatial inclusionary and exclusionary functions, a critical geography lens illuminates the political and economic forces behind the reproduction of common geographical imaginaries such as urban and rural.

Drawing on empirical data from a year-long ethnographic study of a remote, rural community in Northern Wisconsin, this paper foregrounds moments of observed tension among participants as they grapple with perception and misperception of their rural identity by agencies, organizations, policymakers, and businesses. These observations originate at county board and economic development committee meetings as well as an ad-hoc community group dedicated to addressing the local “brain drain,” or the outmigration of young adults (Brown & Schafft, 2011; Carr & Kefalas, 2009; Corbett, 2007). While these moments are not direct observations of school-related meetings or events, I argue that the centrality of community identity and representation to rural development is intrinsically linked to the purposes of local schooling (Author, 2017).

Based on analysis, I argue that anonymization as a (supposedly) ethical principle of qualitative research obfuscates meaningful connections of identity and place in favor of a distanced and ignorant categorization of rural places and people as geographically simple. My own engagement in this process calls into question my approach to critical research, since, to some extent, anonymization may “align researchers with a politics of space that diminishes the sphere of public discourse and contestation” (Nespor, 2000, pg. 554). Through in-field and post-data collection reflection on the work of my critical ethnography, which clearly delineated the relationship between place, identity, and education, I was stunned to recognize my own participation in masking the tangible realities of my research participants in favor of the requirements for transferability and generalizability (Jerolmack & Murphy, 2017).

From this research, I believe it is possible to see how place is a serious factor in social transactions and educational service provisions as well as how it is dismissed as an irrelevant factor in policy and practice. This is a process of erasure - through anonymization and through ignorance of the relationship between place and identity. Therefore, I suggest that the unmasking of place may function as a historical contextualization necessary for bringing rural truths into conversation with urban and suburban realities and in favor of inter-geographic dialogue.

Author

• Jennifer Laura Seelig, Wisconsin Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison