Michael Corbett
Biographic Data
| ID | 239396 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Corbett |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Corbett |
| SIGNATURE | CORBETT M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Tasmania |
| ORCID | 0009-0003-2314-6045 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 108 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
There are many communities here: Teaching in complex rural geographies
Contemporary theory focusses on globalization and standardization of educational governance and assessment as well as diverse identities and distinct yet connected rural, urban and suburban geographies. Dynamic sociopolitical change has rendered the rural-urban distinction increasingly complicated. The global phenomenon of rural school consolidation creates new educational geographies and puts new pressure on teachers in increasing large and dive…
What counts as sustainability: A sociospatial analysis
Sustainability is a ubiquitous term today and one that is central to key environmental and social policy discussions relating to the most pressing questions faced in contemporary societies. In this paper we argue that sustainability needs to be understood in relation to social space. We do so by engaging with Pierre Bourdieu’s thinking tools as well as Edward Soja’s spatial analysis to deconstruct how differently positioned actors understand and …
Contested geographies: Competing Constructions of Community and Efficiency in Small School Debates
The history of rural education in North America can be understood as a history of school closure, amalgamation, and consolidation of schools. Typically, historical and geographical arguments have converged in debates about whether or not to close small community schools, which are positioned as the victims of the march of time and reconfiguration of space. In this paper, we analyse the archetypical positioning of rural parents in the 'school wars…
Rural youth out-migration and education: Challenges to Aspirations Discourse in Mobile Modernity
We argue here that critical educational scholarship is crucial to developing educational analysis attuned to the nuances of place, mobility, and change in rural locations. Critical sociological analysis, we argue, can also nuance and complicate simplistic portrayals of rural communities and their social, economic, and cultural character. Two central narratives in rural education today relate first, to the economic and social problems faced by cha…
Parents’ perspectives on preschool children’s in-home falls: Implications for injury prevention
Falls from a height are a leading cause of injury for children globally, yet few effective prevention strategies have been developed. For young children, serious falls occur mostly in the home, which implicates caregivers' safety practices in prevention. This qualitative study examined parents' views about this issue. Parents of 1 through 4 year olds participated in focus groups and provided opinions about in-home falls, including preventability,…
Music Education and/in Rural Social Space: Making Space for Musical Diversity Beyond the City
In this paper I argue that there are established vernacular music traditions in rural communities that can be productively integrated into a hybrid music education curriculum. I draw on my own informal education in folk music, which bore an ambivalent relationship to the kind of formal music education on offer in my youth. I argue that music education can and should draw on vernacular, hybrid, and improvisational rural musical traditions and prac…
Rural Futures: Development, Aspirations, Mobilities, Place, and Education
This piece responds to the content of each of the articles in this issue and raises questions in response to some explicit and implicit themes including particularly the way that differently positioned rural youth are “oriented” in the course of their educational experience. These articles are read as accounts of people in place that confound and confront simplistic deficit assessments of educational paths, aspirations, relationships, and purpose…
Towards a rural sociological imagination: Ethnography and schooling in mobile modernity
In 1959, C. Wright Mills coined the phrase ‘the sociological imagination’ to offer a critical assessment of a discipline he saw descending into a technical or abstract empiricist practice that he feared would ultimately deepen human alienation and oppression. Mills positioned the sociologist as a careful, critical scholar working in the space between biography and history. In this paper, I offer a meta-ethnographic analysis of several recent crit…
Small Schools in a Big World: Thinking About a Wicked Problem
The position of small rural schools is precarious in much of rural Canada today. What is to be done about small schools in rural communities which are often experiencing population decline and aging, economic restructuring, and the loss of employment and services? We argue this issue is a classic "wicked" policy problem. Small schools activists have a worldview that is focused on maintaining infrastructure and even community survival, while schoo…
Introduction: From Shinjuku to River John: The Neoliberal Juggernaut, Efficiency, and Small Rural Schools
It may seem a bit odd to begin an article that introduces a series of pieces about small rural schools in Canada, Norway and in Australia by referring to Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station; but that is how I want to begin. Shinjuku is the world’s busiest railway station, moving approximately 3.4 million people each day through its turnstiles. I was there last summer. One of the great ironies of being a scholar of rural education is that I am able to go to …
Politics and Religion in the United States
There is a complex relationship between religiosity and secularism in the American experience. America is notable both for its strict institutional separation of church and state, and for the strong role that religion has played in its major social movements and ongoing political life. This book seeks to illuminate for readers the dynamics underlying this seeming paradox, and to examine how the various religious groups in America have approached …
The Ambivalence of Community: A Critical Analysis of Rural Education's Oldest Trope
The concept of community has been central to the discourse of rural education for generations. At the same time, community has been and continues to be a deeply problematic concept. I begin this analysis with Raymond Williams's characterization of the idea of community as a uniquely positive concept, arguing that this framing is, as Williams pointed out, deeply problematic. This paper interrogates the idea of community and looks at the way it has…
Politics and Religion in the United States
I'm going to make sure I'm ready before I leave: The complexity of educational and mobility decision-making in a Canadian coastal community
Designing Sustainable Communities: Learning from Village Homes
Disaggregating Student Resistances: Analyzing What Students Pursue with Challenging Agency
In this article, we look into student agency which challenges the existing structures and find that students assume such agency for a purpose: there is something they pursue instead of just resisting something. We raise some critical questions about the concept of resistance in educational thought based upon findings from two dif-ferent qualitative research projects: one in Arctic Finland; and the other in coastal Atlantic Canada. In our research…
Standardized individuality: Cosmopolitanism and educational decision‐making in an Atlantic Canadian rural community
With the rise of network society, consumerism, individualization, globalization and contemporary change forces, students are pressured to both perform well in standardized academic assessments while at the same time constructing a non‐standard, unique project of the self. I argue that this generates a particular set of place‐based tensions for rural students. The paper analyses data from a three‐year study of youth educational decision‐making to …
No Time to Fool Around with The Wrong Education: Socialisation Frames, Timing and High-Stakes Educational Decision Making in Changing Rural Places
There have been as yet few qualitative analyses of either the lives of rural youth or their schooling in North America. While urban or suburban sociologies of education have focused heavily on the social mobility of youth, rural sociologies of education have focused on the geographic mobility of youth, typically out of rural areas. Indeed there have been a number of studies of youth migration from rural parts of North America, but these have almo…
Backing the right horse: Teacher education, sociocultural analysis and literacy in rural education
All kinds of potential: Women and out-migration in an Atlantic Canadian coastal community
It Was Fine, if You Wanted to Leave: Educational Ambivalence in a Nova Scotian Coastal Community 1963-1998
This article reports on a study of schooling in southwest Nova Scotia. Using Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and habitus, I analyze rural men's relationships involving identity, work, place, and schooling to explain continuing high male dropout rates and local traditions of ambivalence and resistance to schooling. I conclude that the tension between formal schooling and place is endemic in many rural communities and that qualitative migra…
Contemporary Social Research Methods
Changes in noneconomic political attitudes of Southern and Northern youth, 1970s to 1980s
Change and stability in sexism among college students: A three-year panel study
Public Support for “Law and Order”: Interrelationships with System Affirmation and Attitudes Toward Minorities
This study deals with interrelationships among system affirmation, intoler‐ance of minorities or minority viewpoints. and support for a tough role for the police and courts in the criminal justice system. Using data from a survey of “Middletown” (Muncie, Indiana), all three of these concepts are‐as expected‐moderately highly interrelated. Those high in system affir‐mation are also high in intolerance, and they are high in support for a tough role…
All kinds of potential: Women and out-migration in an Atlantic Canadian coastal community
I'm going to make sure I'm ready before I leave: The complexity of educational and mobility decision-making in a Canadian coastal community
Standardized individuality: Cosmopolitanism and educational decision‐making in an Atlantic Canadian rural community
With the rise of network society, consumerism, individualization, globalization and contemporary change forces, students are pressured to both perform well in standardized academic assessments while at the same time constructing a non‐standard, unique project of the self. I argue that this generates a particular set of place‐based tensions for rural students. The paper analyses data from a three‐year study of youth educational decision‐making to …
Rural youth out-migration and education: Challenges to Aspirations Discourse in Mobile Modernity
We argue here that critical educational scholarship is crucial to developing educational analysis attuned to the nuances of place, mobility, and change in rural locations. Critical sociological analysis, we argue, can also nuance and complicate simplistic portrayals of rural communities and their social, economic, and cultural character. Two central narratives in rural education today relate first, to the economic and social problems faced by cha…
No Time to Fool Around with The Wrong Education: Socialisation Frames, Timing and High-Stakes Educational Decision Making in Changing Rural Places
There have been as yet few qualitative analyses of either the lives of rural youth or their schooling in North America. While urban or suburban sociologies of education have focused heavily on the social mobility of youth, rural sociologies of education have focused on the geographic mobility of youth, typically out of rural areas. Indeed there have been a number of studies of youth migration from rural parts of North America, but these have almo…
Disaggregating Student Resistances: Analyzing What Students Pursue with Challenging Agency
In this article, we look into student agency which challenges the existing structures and find that students assume such agency for a purpose: there is something they pursue instead of just resisting something. We raise some critical questions about the concept of resistance in educational thought based upon findings from two dif-ferent qualitative research projects: one in Arctic Finland; and the other in coastal Atlantic Canada. In our research…
Towards a rural sociological imagination: Ethnography and schooling in mobile modernity
In 1959, C. Wright Mills coined the phrase ‘the sociological imagination’ to offer a critical assessment of a discipline he saw descending into a technical or abstract empiricist practice that he feared would ultimately deepen human alienation and oppression. Mills positioned the sociologist as a careful, critical scholar working in the space between biography and history. In this paper, I offer a meta-ethnographic analysis of several recent crit…
Backing the right horse: Teacher education, sociocultural analysis and literacy in rural education
Rural Futures: Development, Aspirations, Mobilities, Place, and Education
This piece responds to the content of each of the articles in this issue and raises questions in response to some explicit and implicit themes including particularly the way that differently positioned rural youth are “oriented” in the course of their educational experience. These articles are read as accounts of people in place that confound and confront simplistic deficit assessments of educational paths, aspirations, relationships, and purpose…
It Was Fine, if You Wanted to Leave: Educational Ambivalence in a Nova Scotian Coastal Community 1963-1998
This article reports on a study of schooling in southwest Nova Scotia. Using Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and habitus, I analyze rural men's relationships involving identity, work, place, and schooling to explain continuing high male dropout rates and local traditions of ambivalence and resistance to schooling. I conclude that the tension between formal schooling and place is endemic in many rural communities and that qualitative migra…
Introduction: From Shinjuku to River John: The Neoliberal Juggernaut, Efficiency, and Small Rural Schools
It may seem a bit odd to begin an article that introduces a series of pieces about small rural schools in Canada, Norway and in Australia by referring to Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station; but that is how I want to begin. Shinjuku is the world’s busiest railway station, moving approximately 3.4 million people each day through its turnstiles. I was there last summer. One of the great ironies of being a scholar of rural education is that I am able to go to …
The Ambivalence of Community: A Critical Analysis of Rural Education's Oldest Trope
The concept of community has been central to the discourse of rural education for generations. At the same time, community has been and continues to be a deeply problematic concept. I begin this analysis with Raymond Williams's characterization of the idea of community as a uniquely positive concept, arguing that this framing is, as Williams pointed out, deeply problematic. This paper interrogates the idea of community and looks at the way it has…
Changes in noneconomic political attitudes of Southern and Northern youth, 1970s to 1980s
Public Support for “Law and Order”: Interrelationships with System Affirmation and Attitudes Toward Minorities
This study deals with interrelationships among system affirmation, intoler‐ance of minorities or minority viewpoints. and support for a tough role for the police and courts in the criminal justice system. Using data from a survey of “Middletown” (Muncie, Indiana), all three of these concepts are‐as expected‐moderately highly interrelated. Those high in system affir‐mation are also high in intolerance, and they are high in support for a tough role…
What counts as sustainability: A sociospatial analysis
Sustainability is a ubiquitous term today and one that is central to key environmental and social policy discussions relating to the most pressing questions faced in contemporary societies. In this paper we argue that sustainability needs to be understood in relation to social space. We do so by engaging with Pierre Bourdieu’s thinking tools as well as Edward Soja’s spatial analysis to deconstruct how differently positioned actors understand and …
Contested geographies: Competing Constructions of Community and Efficiency in Small School Debates
The history of rural education in North America can be understood as a history of school closure, amalgamation, and consolidation of schools. Typically, historical and geographical arguments have converged in debates about whether or not to close small community schools, which are positioned as the victims of the march of time and reconfiguration of space. In this paper, we analyse the archetypical positioning of rural parents in the 'school wars…
Music Education and/in Rural Social Space: Making Space for Musical Diversity Beyond the City
In this paper I argue that there are established vernacular music traditions in rural communities that can be productively integrated into a hybrid music education curriculum. I draw on my own informal education in folk music, which bore an ambivalent relationship to the kind of formal music education on offer in my youth. I argue that music education can and should draw on vernacular, hybrid, and improvisational rural musical traditions and prac…
Small Schools in a Big World: Thinking About a Wicked Problem
The position of small rural schools is precarious in much of rural Canada today. What is to be done about small schools in rural communities which are often experiencing population decline and aging, economic restructuring, and the loss of employment and services? We argue this issue is a classic "wicked" policy problem. Small schools activists have a worldview that is focused on maintaining infrastructure and even community survival, while schoo…
Change and stability in sexism among college students: A three-year panel study
Sexism Among College Students: Do Males and Females Differ
Sexism Among College Students: Do Males and Females Differ
Value Priorities of College Students: A Longitudinal study
Change and stability in sexism among college students: A three-year panel study
Public Support for “Law and Order”: Interrelationships with System Affirmation and Attitudes Toward Minorities
This study deals with interrelationships among system affirmation, intoler‐ance of minorities or minority viewpoints. and support for a tough role for the police and courts in the criminal justice system. Using data from a survey of “Middletown” (Muncie, Indiana), all three of these concepts are‐as expected‐moderately highly interrelated. Those high in system affir‐mation are also high in intolerance, and they are high in support for a tough role…
Changes in noneconomic political attitudes of Southern and Northern youth, 1970s to 1980s
Contemporary Social Research Methods
It Was Fine, if You Wanted to Leave: Educational Ambivalence in a Nova Scotian Coastal Community 1963-1998
This article reports on a study of schooling in southwest Nova Scotia. Using Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and habitus, I analyze rural men's relationships involving identity, work, place, and schooling to explain continuing high male dropout rates and local traditions of ambivalence and resistance to schooling. I conclude that the tension between formal schooling and place is endemic in many rural communities and that qualitative migra…
All kinds of potential: Women and out-migration in an Atlantic Canadian coastal community
No Time to Fool Around with The Wrong Education: Socialisation Frames, Timing and High-Stakes Educational Decision Making in Changing Rural Places
There have been as yet few qualitative analyses of either the lives of rural youth or their schooling in North America. While urban or suburban sociologies of education have focused heavily on the social mobility of youth, rural sociologies of education have focused on the geographic mobility of youth, typically out of rural areas. Indeed there have been a number of studies of youth migration from rural parts of North America, but these have almo…
Backing the right horse: Teacher education, sociocultural analysis and literacy in rural education
Standardized individuality: Cosmopolitanism and educational decision‐making in an Atlantic Canadian rural community
With the rise of network society, consumerism, individualization, globalization and contemporary change forces, students are pressured to both perform well in standardized academic assessments while at the same time constructing a non‐standard, unique project of the self. I argue that this generates a particular set of place‐based tensions for rural students. The paper analyses data from a three‐year study of youth educational decision‐making to …
Disaggregating Student Resistances: Analyzing What Students Pursue with Challenging Agency
In this article, we look into student agency which challenges the existing structures and find that students assume such agency for a purpose: there is something they pursue instead of just resisting something. We raise some critical questions about the concept of resistance in educational thought based upon findings from two dif-ferent qualitative research projects: one in Arctic Finland; and the other in coastal Atlantic Canada. In our research…
Designing Sustainable Communities: Learning from Village Homes
I'm going to make sure I'm ready before I leave: The complexity of educational and mobility decision-making in a Canadian coastal community
Politics and Religion in the United States
There is a complex relationship between religiosity and secularism in the American experience. America is notable both for its strict institutional separation of church and state, and for the strong role that religion has played in its major social movements and ongoing political life. This book seeks to illuminate for readers the dynamics underlying this seeming paradox, and to examine how the various religious groups in America have approached …
The Ambivalence of Community: A Critical Analysis of Rural Education's Oldest Trope
The concept of community has been central to the discourse of rural education for generations. At the same time, community has been and continues to be a deeply problematic concept. I begin this analysis with Raymond Williams's characterization of the idea of community as a uniquely positive concept, arguing that this framing is, as Williams pointed out, deeply problematic. This paper interrogates the idea of community and looks at the way it has…
Politics and Religion in the United States
Towards a rural sociological imagination: Ethnography and schooling in mobile modernity
In 1959, C. Wright Mills coined the phrase ‘the sociological imagination’ to offer a critical assessment of a discipline he saw descending into a technical or abstract empiricist practice that he feared would ultimately deepen human alienation and oppression. Mills positioned the sociologist as a careful, critical scholar working in the space between biography and history. In this paper, I offer a meta-ethnographic analysis of several recent crit…
Small Schools in a Big World: Thinking About a Wicked Problem
The position of small rural schools is precarious in much of rural Canada today. What is to be done about small schools in rural communities which are often experiencing population decline and aging, economic restructuring, and the loss of employment and services? We argue this issue is a classic "wicked" policy problem. Small schools activists have a worldview that is focused on maintaining infrastructure and even community survival, while schoo…
Introduction: From Shinjuku to River John: The Neoliberal Juggernaut, Efficiency, and Small Rural Schools
It may seem a bit odd to begin an article that introduces a series of pieces about small rural schools in Canada, Norway and in Australia by referring to Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station; but that is how I want to begin. Shinjuku is the world’s busiest railway station, moving approximately 3.4 million people each day through its turnstiles. I was there last summer. One of the great ironies of being a scholar of rural education is that I am able to go to …
Parents’ perspectives on preschool children’s in-home falls: Implications for injury prevention
Falls from a height are a leading cause of injury for children globally, yet few effective prevention strategies have been developed. For young children, serious falls occur mostly in the home, which implicates caregivers' safety practices in prevention. This qualitative study examined parents' views about this issue. Parents of 1 through 4 year olds participated in focus groups and provided opinions about in-home falls, including preventability,…
Music Education and/in Rural Social Space: Making Space for Musical Diversity Beyond the City
In this paper I argue that there are established vernacular music traditions in rural communities that can be productively integrated into a hybrid music education curriculum. I draw on my own informal education in folk music, which bore an ambivalent relationship to the kind of formal music education on offer in my youth. I argue that music education can and should draw on vernacular, hybrid, and improvisational rural musical traditions and prac…
Rural Futures: Development, Aspirations, Mobilities, Place, and Education
This piece responds to the content of each of the articles in this issue and raises questions in response to some explicit and implicit themes including particularly the way that differently positioned rural youth are “oriented” in the course of their educational experience. These articles are read as accounts of people in place that confound and confront simplistic deficit assessments of educational paths, aspirations, relationships, and purpose…
Contested geographies: Competing Constructions of Community and Efficiency in Small School Debates
The history of rural education in North America can be understood as a history of school closure, amalgamation, and consolidation of schools. Typically, historical and geographical arguments have converged in debates about whether or not to close small community schools, which are positioned as the victims of the march of time and reconfiguration of space. In this paper, we analyse the archetypical positioning of rural parents in the 'school wars…
Rural youth out-migration and education: Challenges to Aspirations Discourse in Mobile Modernity
We argue here that critical educational scholarship is crucial to developing educational analysis attuned to the nuances of place, mobility, and change in rural locations. Critical sociological analysis, we argue, can also nuance and complicate simplistic portrayals of rural communities and their social, economic, and cultural character. Two central narratives in rural education today relate first, to the economic and social problems faced by cha…
Sociology (21 works) · Political science (17 works) · Indigenous and Place-Based Education (13 works) · Education Systems and Policy (12 works) · Social science (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Economic growth (7 works) · Gender Studies (6 works)