Abstract
A focus on rurality
has been largely absent from much contemporary educational policy
discussion. At best, rural education is a peripheral concern just
as rural areas are increasingly considered marginal to the development
of a globalized, networked, fast capitalism. In Canada rural,
coastal, northern, and single-industry communities that were built
around primary resource extraction are constructed as social and
educational problem spaces partly because their residents are
often attached to these places long after they have served their
economic purpose as natural resource deposits for the interests
of capital. In fact rurality and rusticity are typically seen
as one face of the kind of localized social condition that formal
education is designed to normalize and transform by fostering
outmigration and a general orientation to urban life and to mobility.
In this analysis I use Derrida's idea of spectrology to examine
some images of rurality as persistent, place-attached ghosts haunting
the educational project of modernity.
Copyright © AJER, the Faculty of Education, and the University
of Alberta, 2007.
Last revised: February 22, 2007.
Designed by G.H. Buck