This piece responds to the content of each of the articles in this issue and raises questions in response to some explicit and implicit themes including particularly the way that differently positioned rural youth are "oriented" in the course of their educational experience. These articles are read as accounts of people in place that…

We argue here that critical educational scholarship is crucial to developing educational analysis attuned to the nuances of place, mobility, and change in rural locations. Critical sociological analysis, we argue, can also nuance and complicate simplistic portrayals of rural communities and their social, economic, and cultural character. Two…

There have been as yet few qualitative analyses of either the lives of rural youth or their schooling in North America. While urban or suburban sociologies of education have focused heavily on the social mobility of youth, rural sociologies of education have focused on the geographic mobility of youth, typically out of rural areas. Indeed there…