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Towards a rural sociological imagination: ethnography and schooling in mobile modernity

journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-18, 15:06 authored by Michael Corbett
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.

History

Publication title

Ethnography and Education

Volume

10

Pagination

263-277

ISSN

1745-7823

Department/School

Faculty of Education

Publisher

Routledge

Place of publication

United Kingdom

Rights statement

Copyright 2015 Taylor & Francis

Repository Status

  • Restricted

Socio-economic Objectives

Expanding knowledge in education

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