Reading Lefebvre from the periphery: Thinking globally about the rural

What I want to do here is make some suggestions, drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre and Jacques Lacan, to continue the work of unsettling static conceptions of what rurality is. In doing so, I will refer to rural education pointing to my own desire to think beyond the confines of conventional educational theory which tends to operate in a placeless temporal dimension, organized around imaginaries of development and progress. I also want to think beyond spatial constructions that imagine rurality as modernity's other, and that also imagine the compensatory education that should happen in rural places.

Lefebvre's idea of the production of space is, I think, a useful tool for thinking about geographies of education and the way these geographies are made and remade. To do this I weave through the text an analysis of my own teaching practice that is located in rural locations. This analysis is a self-study in the sense that my research and teaching experience in rural areas have led me to consider in more detail how space and place might be thought about more productively. What I offer here are the reflections of a place-oriented qualitative educational researcher provisionally thinking through spatial theory to understand a research trajectory.