Framing Rural and Remote: Key Issues, Debates, Definitions, and Positions in Constructing Rural and Remote Disadvantage

Educational research and public policy comment are often framed around notion of binaries and social construction that reference an implicit norm. For the purposes of this edition, important binaries include advantage/disadvantage, centre/periphery, and rural/urban. Similarly, terms such as ‘rural’ and ‘remote’ are often socially constructed with reference to these binaries. For instance, remote is often conceptualised as peripheral to the city by distance as well as socially and culturally. However, as this chapter discusses, for people whose families live in remote towns, it is the city that is distant and peripheral. Such perspectives are rarely considered in discussions of educational policy. To address this, and other, implicit biases, this chapter examines how language socially constricts the ‘problem’ to be solved, rather than implicitly valuing people, places, and communities.