Imagining the Rural: Political Economy and Racialized Representations of Rurality in Education and Social Research

• In Event: Race, Rurality, and Education: Envisioning Educational Equity in Racialized Rural Spaces

Abstract

Purpose
“The urban imaginary” (Author, 2007) is a widely-recognized set of assumptions about urban life grounded in research literature that illuminates the dominance of whiteness in perpetuating these perceptions. Similarly, this paper considers the set of assumptions that constitute “the rural imaginary” and the racialized consequences it produces.

Theoretical Framework
Whiteness is an oppressive ideology which positions white people and white culture as normal and BIPOC as aberrant (Author, 2013; Roediger 1994). Whiteness stems from structures of white supremacy and is implicated in common perceptions of rurality. Imagining the rural in particular ways produces real, material effects that lead to its isolation and abandonment, while the rural’s material organization coincides with representations that add to disinvestment in its future, further marginalizing its populations (Reynolds, 2017). In other words, ideas about the rural exist in a recursive relationship with its material reality.

Methods
Organizationally, the authors created a detailed list of concepts comprising the urban imaginary, then combed the rural education literature seeking parallel examples for the rural, frequently noting them as opposite. Here, they analyze emerging themes pertaining to the co-constitution of race and rurality.

Data Sources
While mainly a conceptual argument, the paper relies on secondary sources of empirical evidence from existing literature.

Results
Theme One: Romanticizing the Rural
Idyllic representations of the rural perpetuate “good ol’ days” nostalgia, reinforcing its separation from mainstream, often more racially diverse, contemporary society. With respect to the political economy, many rural places rely on outsiders to consume the “rest and relaxation” that rural landscapes offer. In these ways, romanticizing the rural implies a more innocent space free of social tension that one assumes in urban spaces.

Theme Two: Rural as a White Space
BIPOCs populate rural settings, yet the rural is imagined almost exclusively as white. Part of this imagining involves perceiving rural people as white and racist, or at least racially unsophisticated. Notably, Donald Trump’s three presidential campaigns leveraged white working-class voter resentments (McGhee, 2021), impelling some voters to grasp at opportunities to maintain racial hierarchies (e.g., the January 6th, 2021 insurrectionary attack).

Theme Three: The Rural “Wasteland”
Local factory closures, exploitative resource extraction practices, and the opioid crisis have left some rural spaces with abandoned houses, boarded-up businesses, and pervasive unemployment: in short, a rural “wasteland.” Consequently, rural schools face the dilemma of preparing their brightest students to eventually pursue opportunities elsewhere, further depleting the rural of valuable resources, including intellectual ones (Carr & Kefalas, 2009).

Scholarly Significance
Interrogating dominant discourses surrounding rural people and how they contribute to the racialization of rurality demystifies an ideological orientation that keeps rural education and social systems under-resourced, maintains white racial retrenchment, and robs rural students of critical knowledge about racial history. In this unprecedented political moment where actors seeking to upend racial progress are unchecked by Constitutional systems, problematizing the dominant themes in rural representation is urgent to understand more critically the relationship between rurality, race, racial power, and race stratification so that a more hopeful imagining of rural futures is possible.

Authors

• Rachelle Kuehl, Virginia Tech

• Zeus Leonardo, University of California - Berkeley