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 space between biography and history. In this paper, I offer a meta-ethnographic analysis of several recent critical ethnographies in the rural sociology of education using my own experience as a rural education ethnographer to frame the analysis. I argue that critical ethnographic work is crucial to developing educational analysis that is attuned to the nuances of place and the kind of metrocentric analysis that effectively ‘traps’ rural places in larger structural educational reform narratives.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	ethnography, sociology, rural education, anthropology, imagination
Research Division:	Education
Research Group:	Education systems
Research Field:	Continuing and community education
Objective Division:	Expanding Knowledge
Objective Group:	Expanding knowledge
Objective Field:	Expanding knowledge in education
UTAS Author:	Corbett, M (Professor Michael Corbett)
ID Code:	105160
Year Published:	2015
Deposited By:	Education
Deposited On:	2015-12-11
Last Modified:	2017-11-20
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