Rural ‘tourist’—Rural ‘resident’—Betwixt and between places and spaces

Abstract

Despite certain stereotypes and deficit understandings of the rural, this work is no more static than other work in the areas of place and space. Ultimately, the question that guides all of my work is ‘where is the rural in that?’ and this allows me to examine absences and tokenistic gestures in policy and practice in, about, and for rural. In this chapter, I explore how I position myself and how my work is positioned in terms of rural in a time where my identity as a rural researcher is in a state of transition and unsettling as I find myself relocating from the country to the city. What I am teasing out in this chapter is the notion of the distinctions between being a ‘rural resident’ and a ‘rural tourist’ to guide my identity as a researcher that has seen a constant ‘pull to the city’. I juxtapose the notions of ‘tourist’ and ‘resident’ alongside previous theorisations of Pedagogy of the Rural (see Walker-Gibbs et al., 2015, 2018) to problematise and extend on how I conceive of the complexities of rural space given my changing lived experiences and realities. This chapter further considers how some of the underlying assumptions, ‘truths’ and ‘realities’ I hold about rural education and teaching in a complicated and dynamic policy context, remain unchanged. It is argued in this chapter that generally when we think of Rural identity, it is seen to be different to metropolitan and related to accessibility to services (see White and Reid in J Res Rural Educ 23(7):1–11, 2008). But not all rural is created equally. This chapter explores what will it mean to enact this idea of Pedagogy of the Rural from another context as I move from being a rural resident to a rural tourist and how this unsettles my (and others) notions of what it means to be a rural researcher betwixt and between rural places and spaces. In this work, I will focus on Margaret Somerville’s work in her book on Body/landscape journals where she talks about place literacy which through narrative and journaling is ‘based on the experience of the sensing body-in place. What does this place smell like, sound like, look like, feel like when I move through it?’ (Body/landscape journals. Spinifex Press, Melbourne, 1999, p. 153). Finally, this chapter brings into sharp focus how this has impacted on my identity not only as an academic more broadly but as a rural scholar specifically. If place is where I am situated and space is all of the swirling identities that are created with/in these places what does it mean for my practice if I am ‘torn’ betwixt and between?