Introduction – Education and the global rural: Feminist perspectives

Educational research has primarily been concerned with the urban. It is telling, for example, that so many studies of education in the rural begin by noting the lack of literature on the subject (Howley, Theobald, and Howley 2005; Hargreaves, Kvalsund, and Galton 2009; Schafft and Youngblood Jackson 2010). Even when the rural is invoked in educational research it is ‘as mere setting’ (Howley 2004, 258) or ‘context’ (Moletsane and Ntombela 2010, 5). This may go some way to explaining the limited feminist attention to rural education, but we wonder if there are also other factors at play which are worth exploring in this editorial introduction if we are to address this lacuna.