In this article we analyze the emergence of the field of rural literacies. We attempt to map this field in a way that illustrates the foundational ideas of literacy and rurality as relational concepts, which are devoid of meaning as what we call "singularities." Our insistence on the importance of context and place reveals multiple rural…

In 1959, C. Wright Mills coined the phrase "the sociological imagination" to offer a critical assessment of a discipline he saw descending into a technical or abstract empiricist practice that he feared would ultimately deepen human alienation and oppression. Mills positioned the sociologist as a careful, critical scholar working in the…

Rural communities contain a largely unacknowledged innovative capacity founded on improvisational traditions. These traditions may be rooted in work practices in agriculture and other rurally-based productive activities but today they have expanded into other lifeworld locations, particularly virtual spaces that accelerate time-space compression.…

This essay is a response to a question about school desegregation in Nova Scotia, Canada posed by my sister in 2008. I argue that the question itself illustrates the extent to which critical analysis of the politics of race in Canadian schools, particularly in rural areas, is seldom taken up. This feeds into a persistent mythology of a racially…

This essay is a critical reflection on educational standardization, particularly the standardization of assessment flowing down from major international assessment projects like the OECD's Project for International Student Assessment to national and sub-national school systems. I argue that the establishment of an increasingly uniform metric to…