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In this article, a native of Appalachia who has worked in secondary and post-secondary literacy education examines the ways that comics depict life in the region. Particular attention is given to the exploration of the paranormal found in the work of Brian Level, and Level serves as a first-hand voice in this researched work. Additionally, the author explores comics that focus the Appalachian region in terms of masculinity, roles of women, and domestic life, alongside other social norms. In sum, the author wishes to push back on limited and problematic visions of the region, and to comment on the ways in which Appalachian life is rich, diverse, and profligate with literacy practices. The strength of female characters, mysticism in the region, and dialectical distinctions all emerge as patterns from the author's reading across visual literature, and the beauty of the region finds representation as well as juxtaposition with imagery in counterpoint through comics work.

Purpose: Agricultural extension services in poor countries often identify opinion leaders based on criteria such as wealth and social status. We explore the effectiveness of this top-down approach by analysing the role of so-called model and nodal farmers in the diffusion of malt barley in a highland community in Ethiopia. Research approach: We use a retrospective case study design where we combine quantitative network analysis with qualitative data. Findings: Nodal farmers played a more central role in knowledge diffusion of the technology than model farmers. While model farmers were wealthier and better connected to the local authorities, nodal farmers were socio-economically more similar to their fellow farmers. Nodal and model farmers, as well as farmers closely connected to them, had a significantly higher adoption index than the rest. Practical implications: The diffusion of knowledge is an important condition for the adoption of modern agricultural technologies, but it is not enough, particularly when access to external inputs is limited. Moreover, relying on assumed opinion leaders has its limitations and may even reinforce existing inequalities. Theoretical implications: This paper has shown the complementarity of network approaches. We propose network approaches such as social network analysis to identify community brokers who emerge from bottom-up or clan-based, political, knowledge networks that mediate access to agricultural technologies. Originality: Our combined research approach differs from the mainstream of studies in this field that employ either ethnographic fieldwork or (spatial-)econometric methods. We aim to create a bridge between the often separated worlds of (technical) agronomic research, (qualitative) rural sociology, and (quantitative) econometric analysis.

8 minutes and 46 seconds. This was the amount of time it took me to watch George Floyd, an unarmed Black man be murdered at the hands of the police. While George Floyd's death was not the first Black murder to happen while in police custody or in 2020, his death served as a catalyst that reignited something in me, millions of around the globe, and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. While the nation focused on the impact of BLM movement in urban communities, the impact in rural communities was left from the conversation. Rural communities have a complex history of systemic racial, social, educational, and economic inequality, and because of these histories they are uniquely situated to respond to racial inequality in meaningful and authentic ways. Even so, as a Black woman, trained sociologist, and educator situated in a rural, conservative, predominately White community in Texas, organizing and engaging the public in racial justice work has challenges. However, through coordinated and specific efforts it is possible to mobilize the community for change. This essay reflects on those efforts. Drawing on public pedagogy frameworks that explore public educational sites, W. E. B. Du Bois's public sociology, scholar-activist "liberation capital" theory, I try to make sense of applying these perspectives as a tool for engaging my rural town in the BLM movement. Through my observations, reflections, and analysis, I hope to provide practical methods and tools for scholars, researchers, and rural community members that center on how to engage each other and ultimately create capacity for impactful organizing on racial equity in rural communities.

This article describes a project to engage sociology students in real-world research designed to foster critical thinking about food security. Faculty-librarian collaboration was an essential component. An open-ended questionnaire was administered to three classes at the end of the semester. Assessed were students' experiences gathering data and applying abstract concepts and theories to the case study. Students characterized their skill development, identified missing project components, and suggested improvements. These responses were assessed via a rubric to document three types of thinking: dualistic thinking, the belief that the problem has a right and wrong answer; multiplistic thinking, which recognizes uncertainty and multiple viewpoints to the problem; and systemic thinking, which understands the complexity of the problem and how interrelated factors cause it. Results show that the project helped students identify the complex processes and relationships that contribute to food insecurity.

The traditions of the National FFA Organization (FFA) are grounded in agrarianism. This ideology focuses on the ability of farming and nature to develop citizens and integrity within people. Agrarianism has been an important thread of American rhetoric since the founding of country. The ideology has morphed over the last two centuries as the country developed from a nation of farmers to an industrial world power. The agrarian ideology that resonated in rural America during the formation of the FFA was southern agrarianism. Southern agrarian ideology argued for self-reliance and adherence to past traditions. These concepts appear in the FFA traditions of the creed, opening ceremony, motto, and awards. The historical growth and success of the FFA within rural communities demonstrates the ability of the southern agrarian ideology to connect with contemporary rural values. However, the southern agrarian ideology may not connect with the culture of diverse, urban, or suburban students. Advisers of diverse, urban, or suburban FFA chapters may need to reconceptualize the FFA traditions to accommodate their students.

This paper examines the representation of rural education research orientations--defined in terms of methodological approach, academic focus and place-consciousness--within the literature and across academic disciplines. A content analysis of 155 abstracts from articles published in the Journal of Research in Rural Education and Rural Sociology between 1997 and 2008 reveals that most rural education research is not quantitative, not academically-oriented and not place-conscious. Furthermore, the abstracts show that Rural Educators are underrepresented in academically-oriented research while Rural Social Scientists are overrepresented in that dimension. The implications of these findings for collaboration are discussed and a policy-relevant, innovative, transdisciplinary research agenda is outlined. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

The great majority of America's population now resides in urban/suburban locales and consequently most Americans do not struggle with the question of whether their community can, or should, maintain its own school. Nevertheless, this question continues to confront many rural dwellers in all states. What follows is an action research project intended to examine the consequences of the decision to keep or remove a school from a rural community. The subjects in this study are two Kansas towns that exist a mere five miles from one another. The town that kept its school continues to sustain itself, while the town that lost its school has almost disappeared.

The familiar advertising slogan, "Up here it's different," used to attract visitors to the rugged beauty of County Donegal, was correct in highlighting that things are different in Donegal, although not for the reasons one might connect with tourism. For many, Donegal evokes nostalgic images of old, rural Ireland such as close community bonds, unspoilt landscape, strong agriculture and fishing industries. Unfortunately such idyllic reminiscences are somewhat at odds with the realities of life in Donegal, often described by residents as "the forgotten county." While many of the towns and villages in Donegal exhibit some of the economic, political, cultural and social issues, this article focuses on the villages of St. Johnston and Carrigans in East Donegal. It examines the economic, environmental, social and political difficulties by looking at the two rural communities. Here, the author explores the importance of the community and voluntary sector in responding to issues within communities and posits community development as an essential process in making change. The author outlines the interconnectedness of community development and community education and refers to the relevance of Freire's pedagogy for this work. (Contains 2 footnotes.)

Pedagogy of the Rural is an approach to capture the complexities of rural space and place by challenging simple understandings of what it means to be a teacher in rural settings. Using Harré's positioning theory, Baudrillard's concepts of simulation and simulacra, and Lefebvre's space and economic geographies to form a composite theory through which we analyse longitudinal data from interviews with three graduates and their principals in two rural Victorian schools in Australia. We identify the intricacies of beginning teachers' understandings of, and positionings in, rural space and place. We highlight how size matters in the way these teachers value their rural educational experiences within the liminal space of identity formation. It is in this liminal time and space that concerns around retention and attrition of beginning teachers in rural schools are compounded by factors such as access to professional learning and resources, and isolation and visibility within communities.

Did rural America bring Donald Trump to the presidency? As a phenomenon related to the rise of Trump, the authors try, in this paper, to explain the conservatism that surrounds them personally, as rural residents and rural education scholars. Their neighbors are (mostly) conservative; in part it defines them; it is part of their culture. They have suffered loss across generations, so they are interested to hold on to familiar ways of living. The schools play a contradictory role in this, as rural scholars (worldwide) know well. The authors present four explanations of Trump-related conservatism, all of which, they believe, are apt to some degree. They may not add up convincingly, but they might be a start. First, they explain voting for Trump as a "weapon of the weak" (see, e.g., Scott, 1985). Second, they deal with the Republican allegiances of many rural voters as a variant of "false consciousness." Third, they examine the "rural resonance with fundamentalism"--a religious revival cultivated since about 1970 and marketed nationwide even earlier than that (see, e.g., Grem, 2016; Miller, 2014). Finally, they address "racism as endemic and ubiquitous" in White America, with more polite manifestations in polite society and more blatant ones down home (see, e.g., Inwood, 2015).

This study examined the congruence between the priorities of the Manitoba Government's "Kindergarten to Senior 4 (K-S4) Education Agenda for Student Success" and priorities of stakeholders in a rural Manitoba school division, and the division's capacity to achieve them. Capacity included three components for success: Legitimization of Alternatives, Diverse Networks, and Resource Mobilization. The findings suggest that the theoretical conceptualizations of how rural areas develop and/or thrive have yet to be refined. Many of the findings coincide with Howley's (1997) ideas that school reform efforts tend to essentialize schooling across contexts for reasons that do not always reflect local purposes, interests, and/or capacities. (Contains 1 note.)

For many years, sociologists, political scientists, and management scholars have readily relied on Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) for the purpose of configurational causal modeling. However, this article reveals that a severe problem in the application of QCA has gone unnoticed so far: model ambiguities. These arise when multiple causal models fare equally well in accounting for configurational data. Mainly due to the uncritical import of an algorithm that is unsuitable for causal modeling, researchers have typically been unaware of the whole model space. As a result, there exists an indeterminable risk for practically all QCA studies published in the last quarter century to have presented findings that their data did not warrant. Using hypothetical data, we first identify the algorithmic source of ambiguities and discuss to what extent they affect different methodological aspects of QCA. By reanalyzing a published QCA study from rural sociology, we then show that model ambiguities are not a mere theoretical possibility but a reality in applied research, which can assume such extreme proportions that no causal conclusions whatsoever are possible. Finally, the prevalence of model ambiguities is examined by performing a comprehensive analysis of 192 truth tables across 28 QCA studies published in applied sociology. In conclusion, we urge that future QCA practice ensures full transparency with respect to model ambiguities, both by informing readers of QCA-based research about their extent and by employing algorithms capable of revealing them.

In the context of information and communication technologies in five Newfoundland coastal communities, this article deals with participatory research and outreach. Outreach in these communities, reeling from the near-collapse of the fishery and struggling to survive in a climate of neo-liberal restructuring, is considered to be a holistic educational enterprise involving new technologies and the popular media, schools, and their district officers, clinics and regional health care providers, and children and adults as lifelong learners. Based on five approaches that emerged in the final year of one project--the work of an on-site liaison, a residential workshop, community workshops, reports through popular media, and contacts with outside organizations--the author argues that outreach should be recognized as integral to all stages of participatory research. (Contains 3 notes.) [This article was initially presented as a keynote address at the conference, "Questioning Rurality," Acadia University, March 2005.]

This analysis draws on interview data from a three-year study of educational decision making of youth living in a coastal community in Atlantic Canada. Students whose educational and mobility aspirations extend outside the known spaces of the community develop the ability to negotiate multiple social spaces in and out of school. The school- successful "floater" identity position is assumed by youth comfortable in a variety of social groups and situations ranging from peer cliques to interactions with teachers and other institutional authority figures. This contrasts with more localized identity positions, marked by strong and exclusive identification with local networks. (Contains 5 notes.)

For many teachers, an appointment to a rural school is their first experience of living and working in a context where they are highly visible and are likely to be known of and known about by far more people than they know of and know about. Space for "making errors" and recovering from them without impairment to becoming an effective teacher, is very limited compared to teachers and other professionals who work in cities and can become largely anonymous once they leave their working contexts. The concept of a mental map is derived from my experience as a teacher in a rural town and Soja's (1996) challenge to think differently about space and spatiality. It focuses on three domain--personal, professional and public--and is presented as a way of supporting teachers to navigate and negotiate rural places which, contrary to some popular views, are complex and challenging.

Since the 1970s, participatory development has become part and parcel of most practitioner-oriented development studies programs. This reflects a shift in the field of development that has been going on for the past few decades. "Participatory Rural Appraisal" (PRA) is one approach to participatory development that has received much attention and is the source of much debate. In this article, the author examines some of the critiques of PRA, as well as its practical challenges, by drawing upon the author's experiences teaching about participatory development in a graduate level development studies program. (Contains 3 notes.)

In this paper, I respond to the call to articulate experiences of the messy realities of participatory research. I reflect on my engagement and struggle with the realities and ethics of a piece of case study research, which set out with a participatory approach. The project involved a group of young people from an isolated rural community who appeared to be disconnecting from their secondary school. The research set out to develop understanding of the ways in which young people make connections (or not) in and with school, in order to further understanding of how schools might become more inclusive. A series of reflections on moments during the early stages of the research led to a significant shift in the methodological approach. The approach of this project eventually moved away from participatory research to an approach informed by Foucault's "ethical project". Here, the focus is on the subjection and practices of the researcher. I argue that, on reflection, the "ethical project" framework was more appropriate for this kind of research, where the complexities of participatory research were reducing the transparency of complex power structures.

Partnerships between the USDA and rural colleges are one approach that allows individual students and regional economies to fulfill their potential. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has made a decision to be involved with rural community colleges, which has really made a difference on what is happening on campus. Through a dizzying array of programs that include direct loans and grants for facilities, capacity building and institutional improvement, the USDA provides critical funding and guidance that under-resourced community college leaders may have a hard time accessing otherwise for their agricultural programs. This article discusses the role the USDA plays in training the next generation to meet the needs of their students, communities and economies with training at rural community colleges.

The study of the sociopedagogical resources of the countryside, the village ["selo"], is of vital importance both for science and for the revival of the Russian countryside; for the upbringing, education, and social protection of the new generation of citizens; and for the creation of a socially safe environment in which the population of rural communities lives. This article discusses an analysis of the problem of the sociopedagogical resource of the countryside as a factor of its development in Russia. The study shows that changes in rural areas have put at risk the future opportunities of young people. The author posits that what is needed is to harness all of the resources found in the village and dedicate those resources to the task of strengthening the upbringing and aspirations of rural youth.