Exploring the Interplay of Rural Higher Education Policies, Practices, and Methodologies

Dear Colleagues,

Rurality is associated with nature, agriculture, and life-sustaining foodways, as well as poverty, desolation, and the absence of life. Rurality is simultaneously a marker of social (un)desirability, marked by its physical and metaphorical distance from what is urban or modern. These and other mis/representations and realities of rurality call for place-based considerations that are as complex as they are nuanced. This Special Issue attends to rural complexity by challenging researchers, educators, and policymakers to examine rurality using critical, non-deficit frameworks (McNamee et al., 2025), examine the impact of policies across rural contexts (Brenner, 2021, 2023), refine metrics for identifying rural-serving institutions (Koricich et al., 2022), and approach rural inquiries through racial, class, and spatial analyses (Means, 2025).

We invite empirical and conceptual contributions that address, question, critique, and reimagine how policies, practices, and methodologies shape rural higher education landscapes. Priority will be given to contributions that will offer clear guidance for supporting rural educators and policymakers and challenge norms surrounding how to best support rural students. We welcome papers that grapple with rural-focused educational policies and practices, intersectional considerations of rural populations, and innovative methods or theoretically rich engagements.

We especially encourage contributions from scholars who have a meaningful relationship to rural context(s), early-career scholars, and scholars working at minority-serving and/or rural-serving institutions.

References

Brenner, D. (2021). Toward a rural critical policy analysis. In A. P. Azano, K. Eppley, & C. Biddle (Eds.). The Bloomsbury handbook of rural education in the United States (pp. 30–42). Bloomsbury.

Brenner, D. (2023). Rural critical policy analysis: A framework for examining policy through a rural lens. Rural Educator, 44(1), 71–73.

Koricich, A., Sansone, V. A., & Fryar, A. H. (2022). Rural-serving institutions aren’t who you think they are. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 54(3), 28–33.

McNamee, T. C., Ardoin, S., Cooper, N. D., & Sansone, V. A. (2025). “Because I’m from a rural background”: An examination of rural students in higher education through a critical, non-deficit framework. The Journal of Higher Education, 1–31.

Means, D. R. (2025). At the crossroads: Postsecondary education access opportunities and constraints for rural Black students. The Review of Higher Education, 48(2), 165–200.

Dr. Leonard Taylor
Dr. Kamia F. Slaughter
Guest Editors

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