Donehower and her colleagues, as originators of the term, confirm that properly understanding rural literacy is indeed an issue: “As we tried to define rural literacies for the purposes of [our] book, it was telling that we couldn’t find a specific definition that we could work within or against in the field of literacy studies” (Donehower, Hogg, and Schell 2007, p. 4). Their proposal is that it refers, in brief, to “the uses of literacy in rural contexts”: “Rural literacies . . . refers to the particular kinds of literate skills needed to achieve the goals of sustaining life in rural areas”—that is, “pursu[ing] the opportunities and creat[ing] the public policies and economic opportunities needed to sustain rural communities” (p. 4). Further, they argue for “a notion of rural literacy based on a concept of sustainability” (p. 12). They explicitly connect such work with a larger agenda, linked to notions of global citizenship, and involving a view of “rural literacies that are multiple and that encourage identification among rural, urban and suburban citizens” (p. 193). The latter is particularly important: it allows the project of rural literacies to be associated with a distinctly ethical commitment, working toward global ecosocial sustainability. They clearly want this concept and its accompanying program to function as advocacy for rural people and rural communities. “Rural communities have been ill-served in the past by both a lack of research on rural literacy and by research and education initiatives that mischaracterize rural literacy” (p. 27).

This provides a useful platform to work from here. It is important to note that Donehower and her colleagues make no claim to a definitive account of the territory, clearly seeing their work as needing to be extended and supplemented. Nonetheless, that work constitutes an important reference point for research and scholarship addressed to literacy studies and rural education—as is both confirmed and extended in their most recent publication (Donehower, Hogg, and Schell 2011).

In my (Australian) context, very little work exists on rural literacy, and there is little sense of how a rural literacies research program might be qualitatively different and distinct from literacy research per se. A recent preliminary survey of the Australian literature revealed just a handful of papers and reports, and a single national study specifically focused on literacy and rurality (Muspratt, Freebody, and Luke 2001). Rural locations and circumstances do feature in articles on Indigenous education and literacy studies, but without marking rurality as a significant category. More recently, there have been several papers addressed to results of standardized testing programs that reveal disparities relating to rural and Indigenous populations. By and large, however, little attention has been given, to date, to the notion that there may well be distinctive features of literacy in the rural context, or that literacy and rurality can be brought together differently, outside of a hegemonic schooling logic. This indicates that research is urgently needed in this respect, focusing specifically on literacy, rurality, and education—on rural literacies in Australia.

There is more work being done in this area outside Australia (e.g., Brooke 2003; Edmondson 2003; Kelly 2009), even though it is at best a small (sub)field. Also, much literacy research and scholarship effectively still overlooks the rural, and thereby marginalizing it. As Donehower and colleagues observed, “literacy research in our field is skewed toward urban sites and subjects” (2007, p.12). Hence we are much more likely to find work on topics such as “city literacies” (Gregory and Williams 2000), “English in urban classrooms” (Kress et al. 2005) or “urban literacies” (Kinloch 2011)—work for which the reference point is the modern(ist) city, producing, in effect, whether acknowledged or not, a form of metro-normativity. Understanding literacy as “translocal” and “situated,” and linking to critical-cultural work on space(s) and place(s), is, therefore, an important avenue for developing a research program addressed to rural literacies, or the relationship between literacy studies and rural education.

As Cloke (2006, p. 18) has observed, “[t]he idea of rurality seems to be firmly entrenched in popular discourse about space, place and society in the Western world.” Indeed, the concept of rurality itself is “inherently spatial” (Halfacree 2006, p. 44). Building on this idea, Green and Letts (2007, p. 63) argued that what is needed is “a critical socio-spatial framework, a social-dynamic theory of space and spatiality whereby there is a dialectical relationship between space and society, practice and representation, and an emphasis on the social production of space”—more specifically, a way of “thinking differently about issues of space, equity and rural education” (p. 58; emphasis added). Moreover, this needs to be appropriately complex and sophisticated, and in this regard, it is useful to think of the rural as real-and-imaginary, following Soja (1996), or of rurality as pertaining to real-and-imaginary spaces and places. This allows due consideration of desire, fantasy, and anxiety, and the power and pleasures of the Symbolic, and provides a basis for drawing in psychoanalytic work as a further resource for rural education research and rural literacy. In our case, we were able to think of inland NSW and specifically the Far West (“out there”) as an object of “racially-charged fantasies and anxieties” (p. 71). This is particularly resonant given the significant proportion of Aboriginal people living in these areas and the ongoing challenge of Aboriginal education in NSW, and indeed in Australia more generally, with literacy remaining a key and crucial area within which Indigenous disadvantage is realized.

A matter of particular interest arising from this work is what such an argument opens up in terms of a critical account of (rural) educational space. Taking a historical perspective, Green and Letts (p. 61) note “the view, deeply entrenched in the Australian system, that location is of no consequence to the delivery of education, that distance can be effectively annulled, and that space simply doesn’t matter.” Such a view appears to be even more supported and substantiated by contemporary arguments that introducing new digital technology into schooling overcomes many of the difficulties and disadvantages of rural education. The logic is remarkably consistent. Despite strong assertions that place matters, and a historical commitment to equity, this logic produces a particular form of governmental, normalizing space, making it hard to sustain place-based initiatives or to develop more effective equity programs.

There are implications too for researching rural literacies. In NSW, for instance, there is a considerable history of standardized literacy testing, now subsumed within the new National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). While there is still little public analysis of how students in inland NSW fare as a distinct grouping within the total population, Indigenous students are consistently marked out as falling below state averages—especially in more remote locations—along with others from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. This is consistent with research drawing on available PISA and National Benchmark data demonstrating “the underachievement of rural and remote students in the area of literacy when compared to the performance of students in metropolitan areas of Australia” (Pegg and Panizzon 2007, p. 188; Welch, Helme, and Lamb 2007). Despite more enlightened forms of policy related to literacy pedagogy emerging in Australia, and widespread endorsement of “critical literacy,” a gap still exists between theoretical and practical ideologies.

Nonetheless, along with continuing work on disadvantage and poverty, and ongoing concerns with social justice, new interest has developed in notions of place and community—more specifically, place-based community (Nixon and Comber 2009; McInerney, Smyth, and Down 2011). These concepts and proposals have increasingly been drawn into rural educational research (White and Reid 2008; Reid et al. 2010) and, relatedly, work on literacy education and environmental change (Comber, Nixon, and Reid 2007; Cormack, Green, and Reid 2008). Yet, how this has connected with state and national policy agendas heavily invested in standardized testing, committed to accountability, and in practice still oriented to print (Tan and McWilliam 2009) remains uncertain. Do place-referenced pedagogies contribute to enhanced scores in literacy tests? At this stage it is impossible to know. However, there is a case for claiming that accountability regimes such as these constrain the possibilities for place-sensitive work. This is particularly so if they encourage a tighter nexus between teaching and testing, or teaching to the test (Mills 2008). The challenge is to develop a research program that combines critique and creativity, or innovation, and engages with the potential of socially critical and responsible initiatives with regard to literacy, place, sustainability, and rural education.

Making such connections enables a direct link to the work of the Lancaster group on “local literacies” (Barton and Hamilton 2008) and “situated literacies” (Barton, Hamilton, and Ivanîic 2000). The project of situated literacies is especially generative, however, and immediately relevant. Indeed, there is a potentially useful resonance between notions of situated literacies and place-conscious education, in ways that (to my knowledge) haven’t been recognized or capitalized on to date. At the same time, mindful of the critique that such work has attracted (e.g., Brandt and Clinton 2002) and wanting to move beyond its primarily ethnographic orientation, I want to put a somewhat different spin on the term. Following Soja (1996), literacies are to be understood as socially, historically, and spatially situated. Although Soja certainly sees these as profoundly interrelated, within what he calls a “trialectic,” it is the spatial that I focus on here, very briefly. Understanding literacy as spatially situated compels attention to how literacy is realized in space, whether that is the spatial field of the nation or the district, or whatever, and within which are inescapably socio-spatial hierarchies. Hence literacy becomes thinkable in terms of the social difference-dynamics of space, place and scale, and associated trajectories: for instance, what flows from where to where, with what effect. Hence, what has been described as “spatial justice” (Soja 2010) emerges as a focus concern. Introducing time as well as movement into consideration further enriches the picture. What such a revised view of situated li...