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Queer Kids in the Country: Challenges, Resources, and Queer Cultural Capital of Rural LGBTQIA+ Youth
No full textThis qualitative study investigates the experiences of rural youth who identify as LGBTQIA+. Both rural young people and LGBTQIA+ youth are less likely to pursue higher education and more likely to report negative experiences in their schools and communities. Rural LGBTQIA+ youth face different challenges than do urban and suburban queer youth; therefore, different resources and strategies must be unveiled, developed, and employed in an effort to support rural LGBTQIA+ young people. This study explicates the challenges and assets of rural queer youth, finding that such young people continue to experience challenges in their schools and communities, particularly around identity formation. However, these young people also deploy many forms of queer cultural capital (Pennell, 2016). Understanding and cultivating informal resources and tapping queer cultural capital in schools and communities in order to enhance the well-being of rural LGBTQIA+ youth
Sissies at the Cafeteria Table: Toward a Queer Black-town Sense of Place, Education and Life
No full textContemporary research has shown rural communities to be places with diverse identities and ideologies, disrupting much of the mainstream images of rural spaces as isolated, White, monocultural, and conservative. However, the persistent tendency to imagine racial inequality and queer life as urban contributes to the invisibility of intersectional struggle. Drawing from Critical Pedagogy, Black geographies, Black Queer Studies, and Mobility Studies, this study examines the collective educational experience and storytelling of Black rural queers in a Metro-Rural community in the Upper Midwest. Using an autogeographic approach, building from auto-ethnography and archival praxis reveal how the spatial structures that reproduce educational unfreedom reinforces Black rural queer isolation and invisibility and how Black rural queer counter spaces such as the cafeteria, library and athletic field emerge as sites of collectivity and care. This exploration of Black rural queer educational place-making has pedagogical implications for educators, scholars, and organizers with regard to a pedagogy that centers the sense of place of these youth at the intersections of multidimensionality and wellness
Beyond the Bathroom: Systemic Barriers to Trans Student Success
No full textAt the intersection of educational inequity and systemic marginalization, transgender youth face some of their greatest obstacles upon walking through the schoolhouse door—ranging from legislative attacks and gender negation to denied facility access and pervasive bullying. In rural K-12 public schools—where populations are often smaller, more demographically homogenous, and vie for more socially conservative policies—trans youth are particularly vulnerable. Within this context, this piece centers the experiences of transgender students in rural K-12 public schools—highlighting the sociocultural dynamics and systemic barriers that continue to marginalize them within the United States education system today. Through a blend of literature synthesis and personal narrative, I draw from my lived experience as both a former trans student and a current educator in a Virginia public secondary school to illustrate how school policies and practices make it difficult for trans kids to board the bus each morning. Framed as a counter-narrative, this work challenges dominant assumptions about transgender youth in public education and amplifies the realities too often left out of policy conversations. While change is slow and nonlinear at the federal and state levels, my hope is that sharing my story spotlights the resilience of our trans youth and encourages educators to do all they can to reframe and improve their experiences
Queer Methods and Rural Education: Studying the Foxfire Program
No full textDuring the summer of 2023, I conducted a study in rural Rabun County, Georgia, with a cohort of high school students as they worked to create a magazine focused on Appalachian culture. The magazine, known as Foxfire, has been published since 1966 by rural high school students who were led by writing teachers. In its heyday, the Foxfire Magazine was seen as a bastion of critical education, as its teachers and founder implemented Deweyan pedagogy and asked students to critically reflect on issues of rural Southern Appalachian culture in their writing. The Foxfire Magazine was wildly successful, resulting in a series of books based on the magazine\u27s content that eventually generated enough revenue to open a museum focused on Appalachian history. Currently, the Foxfire Museum hosts local high school students each summer as they produce the magazine under the guidance of teachers and volunteers. My role in this throughout the summer was as a researcher as well as a volunteer with the Foxfire leadership program. Throughout this this article, I draw on Chanon Adsanatham\u27s (2019) framework of queer methodology in order to examine the ways in which the learning community of the Foxfire cohort created a space for critical education. Through taking an autoethnographic approach, I apply Adsanatham\u27s heuristic to my own experiences of researching in Rabun County as a queer Appalachian from Kentucky
Review; Rural Education and Queer Identities: Rural and (Out)Rooted
No full textThis book review examines Rural Education and Queer Identities: Rural and (Out)Rooted, edited by Clint Whitten and Amy Price Azano, an interdisciplinary collection that reconceives rural education as a site of queer worldmaking rather than marginalization. Organized around the metaphors of taproots, root systems, and aerial roots, the collection brings together scholarly essays, creative nonfiction, and poetry to challenge dominant narratives that position queerness as incompatible with rural life. The review considers the collection’s implications for pedagogy and place-based education while noting opportunities for further engagement
“I’ve Already Invested So Much Time, Effort, and Money Into This, So I Stay for Me”: A Case Study of Paulina A First-Generation Trans Latina Rural Community College Student
No full textWhile research continues to emerge on queer and/or trans (QT) experiences in higher-education, a paucity remains on the nuanced realities of those who exist at the intersections of identities, institutional, and regional contexts. Guided by jotería identity-and-consciousness, this intrinsic case study focuses on Paulina, a first-generation trans Latina rural community college student via queer pláticas. She informs ways that trans Latina students in rural community colleges exists and resists hostile ecological educational environments and in doing so generate queer futurities of rurality. Paulina’s jota-historia disrupts notions of QTs communities presence in rural spaces, rural spaces as synonymous with white, and Latina/o as binary experiences.
Keywords: rural, queer, trans, queer pláticas, community college, joterí
Rotating along the Borderlands: Contextualizing Border Rurality Among Queer Transfronterizxs College Students
No full textQueer Transfronterizx students at rural higher education institutions experience an array of systemic and racialized inequities related to Queerphobia, residential nativism, and immigration challenges. Through a Critical Race Feminista Methodology (CRFM), seven Queer Transfronterizx college students engaged in testimonios and a Queer plática to shed light into the navigation of their rural higher education contexts and lived experiences. The findings note the collaborators’ experience of (1) endangered educational oases, (2) the dual identity isolation pertaining to Queer and Latinx belongings, (3) transborder hypervigilance emerged from border- crossings practices, and (4) a rural border flexibility that provides Queer privileges. Recommendations for practice and policy are provided, attending to responsiveness of colleges to serve this community
Queer of Color Critique and the Politics of Epistemic Agency: Rural Educators Desettling Curricular Expectations
No full textThe purpose of this research is to use queer of color critique (QOCC) as an analytical framework to explore rural K-12 educators’ epistemic agency. The research focuses on educators’ engagement with a national initiative by an advocacy organization to distribute LGBTQ+ and racially diverse books to K-12 schools. The analysis centers on the educators’ praxis of epistemic agency against settled expectations associated with including queer and trans People of Color’s (QTPOC’s) stories in their schools. Our findings on educators’ epistemic agency center on three areas of knowledge and activity. First, educators demonstrate their ability to be aware of their local political context when navigating policies and decision-makers to create safe spaces and heterogeneous knowledge. Second, rural educators generate a range of curricular opportunities and activities despite structural constraints on their epistemic agency. Third, educators are agentive and resourceful in building epistemic communities of allies and co-conspirators. Overall, this research finds rural educators disrupting settled expectations of white rurality by engaging with the politics of knowledge, intersectionality, and (in)visibility
Reading about Gender Identity in a Rural Community: Discourse around Young Adult Literature and Social Justice
No full textThis study explores how a rural adult book club engaged with gender identity through young adult literature (YAL), focusing on Mason Deaver’s I Wish You All the Best. Facilitated by two teacher educators, the club brought together local residents and a guest speaker from a regional support organization to discuss gender, pronouns, and the experiences of nonbinary youth. Using critical discourse analysis and thematic coding, the authors examine how participants, cisgender adults, navigated unfamiliar concepts, reflected on their own beliefs, and considered implications for their personal and professional lives. Findings highlight the power of YAL to serve as a window, elicit connections, challenge language practices, and examine identities in rural settings. The article offers practical insights for educators, researchers, and community leaders seeking to use literature as a tool for social justice education
Introduction: Queering Rural Education
No full textIn this editorial introduction, we situate this dual-journal special issue within the current legislative landscape targeting queer and trans people across North America in rural communities. We describe our collaboration with the editorial teams of the Journal of Research in Rural Education and the Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education to illuminate the experiences and perspectives of queer youth and adults in and from rural spaces. We then introduce the articles published in JQTSiE, which are organized into four interrelated themes: (1) Embodied Pedagogies and Spatial Navigation, (2) Institutional Structures and Resistance, (3) Community, Literacy, and Representation, and (4) Methodological and Epistemological Reflections. We conclude by calling on scholars to reject metronormative frameworks that position rural queerness as deficit and urging educators to engage these findings as tools for transformation