Despite holding goals such as equity and high quality schooling in the foreground, unexamined urbanormative assumptions and values can underpin policy decisions. The purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of urbanormativity as a process by which inequality is (re)created in rural-specific ways (Fulkerson and Thomas 2014). To do so, I use document analysis and participant observation to examine a case of school consolidation in a micropolitan county in North Central Appalachia. I draw from newspaper articles, meeting minutes and educational documents, opinion editorial pieces, and online comment forums to critically examine how urbanormative assumptions lead to decisions which exacerbate rural-urban inequalities.
In their theoretical framework, Thomas and Fulkerson characterize urbanormativity as both cultural and structural in nature (Fulkerson and Thomas 2014). In preliminary analysis, I have found that urban-based metaphors about schooling color the debate over whether to close “neighborhood schools.” This urban-based cultural framing overlooks the fact that some schools serve not only a neighborhood, but an entire town, and the different consequences that such a loss can have for rural areas. I also examine documents from the district’s history of consolidation, in which they closed the most rural school, dispersing its students and atomizing any sense of community the school’s existence fostered. I will expand this lens to both further examine the cultural meanings people mobilize in arguing for or against the consolidation. I argue that structural inequalities that the consolidation proponents are seeking to alleviate are being perpetuated by the decisions (and non-decisions) about where schools ought to be and what they should be like.
The purpose of this paper is also exploratory as I develop this project into a dissertation. In the larger project, I intend to use visually-elicited interviewing methods, allowing residents to use maps and their own photos of the area to convey the meanings that places in the county hold for them. The decisions about which schools are candidates for renewal and which are set for demolition are not spatially neutral. To move beyond the question of “Who gets what”, I will center the effect of space and its attached meanings to examine “Who gets what where?” (Lobao, Hooks, and Tickamyer 2007, p2-3). To build upon the theory of spatial inequality, I will use the above-mentioned methods to examine how urbanormativity is done in such a way as to create, naturalize, and perpetuate rural-urban inequality.
References:
Fulkerson, Gregory M. and Alexander R. Thomas. 2014. Studies in Urbanormativity: Rural Community in Urban Society. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.
Lobao, Linda M., Gregory Hooks, and Ann R. Tickamyer, eds. 2007. The Sociology of Spatial Inequality. 1 edition. Albany: State University of New York Press.
