Researching Rural Places: On Social Justice and Rural Education

This paper explores some of the political and methodological challenges involved in researching rural education. It begins by outlining the situation in Australia regarding the relationship between social justice and rural education. It first describes the disadvantages experienced by many rural communities and presents an analysis of rural educational achievement in Australia. The paper then argues the limitations of traditional and established notions of social justice and, in this context, presents Soja’s proposal that spatiality is a third way of understanding the world. The paper is organized and informed by the principle that what matters, first and foremost, is the nature of the research problem, with decisions about methodology following, and shaped accordingly