Racialising rural education

Abstract

In recent years critical race theorists of education have demonstrated increased interest in exploring how race is refracted through other social locations to produce multiple and potentially conflicting experiences of advantage and disadvantage (Rollock 2012; Taylor 2009). While this attentiveness to plurality has provided rich insights into how racialized educational inequalities may be shaped by factors such as sexuality, class, disability and gender (see, e.g., Annamma et al. [2013; Gillborn et al. 2012; Msibi 2012), the majority of work has focused on the urban sphere (see however, Dinero 2007; Canessa 2004). Thus, we know little about how rurality as a dynamic and multifaceted material and discursive space mediates racialized educational practices and policies. This is of concern given that in disparate national imaginaries ‘the countryside’ has often been constructed as white rendering non-whites ‘the other’ in the rural (Bryant and Pini 2011; Neal and Walters 2008). One of the outcomes of the imagined whiteness of the rural is that it has licensed a view that race is not a concern for rural areas. In research from rural communities the ‘no problem here’ attitude to racism has been repeatedly found to predominate (Neal 2002, 452; Sizemore 2004, 534; Dunn, Hanna, and Thompson 2001, 1577). Unsurprisingly, literature has countered the claim that racism is an urban phenomenon. Indeed, a growing literature from rural social science has highlighted the prevalence of racialized discrimination as experienced by a wide range of racialized groups such as gypsy travellers, asylum seekers, immigrant workers and indigenous people (Holloway 2007; Hubbard 2005; Nelson 2008; Razman, Pini, and Bryant 2009). What has often been overlooked in this work however, is how race and rurality may be enmeshed in educational sites, practices and identities.