Towards a rural sociological imagination: ethnography and schooling in mobile modernity
Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: 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.
Source: Ethnography & Education
Author: Michael Corbett
Institution: University of Tasmania
Language: English
Topic: Education in Rural Contexts
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1558011737