Rurality, Diversity and Schooling: Multiculturalism in Regional Australia

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Description

Migration and refugee settlement policies have brought significant demographic changes to some regional centres over the past two decades and this book focuses on one such centre, a mid-size town in New South Wales. Historically, social relations in rural settlements have been enacted primarily within a "white/black" (Anglo/Indigenous) binary but in recent years this town has become home to several hundred refugees from Africa, South-East Asia and the Middle East.

Using interview, observational and documentary data, the book examines how multiculturalism is understood, valued and lived in the towns two public high schools. Schools are key sites for everyday interactions between people from diverse ethnic, cultural, language and religious backgrounds. Drawing on critical theories of discourse, space and race, the book examines a host of anxieties in the town and its schools about recent demographic changes revealing how notions of rurality, steeped in colonial narratives about European settlement, productivity and racial superiority, continue to shape how difference is perceived and experienced in regional communities.

Reviews

Focusing upon two state high schools in rural Australia, Colvin presents an empirically rich and engaging analysis of multicultural diversity. This important book challenges assumptions that associate rural contexts with whiteness and asks incisive questions about the language and narratives of diversity, including the silences and exclusions involved. -- Peter Hopkins, Professor of Social Geography, Newcastle University, UK
This book makes a powerful and unique contribution to the growing field of antiracist studies of education and rurality. Colvins research provides a detailed and unflinching study of diversity, racism and the realities of policy and practice in a regional Australian town. Hidden contradictions and power-plays are explored in a bold, nuanced and complex analysis that has international relevance. -- David Gillborn, editor-in-chief of the journal Race Ethnicity and Education

It is unsettling reading to learn common-sense and feel-good ideas about difference and diversity are
entangled with the reproduction of racial hierarchies and inequalities, but it also gives space to thinking about other ways schools can operate to build inclusion and belonging. It moves beyond critique to identify ways schooling outside cities can operate to be more equitable and inclusive.

-- Barbara Pini, Professor in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences, Griffith University, Australia
This is a superb book. Urgent, because the countryside too often drifts out of the analysis of racialised social relations; compelling, in the attention it pays to school life in small towns which are more multicultural than imagined; rigorous in its systematic use of thick, detailed data; and beautifully written throughout. Neroli Colvin uses a rural lens to lift the hood of modern Australian discourse around multiculturalism and uncovers the persistent contradictions and coloniality that shape it. -- Sarah Neal, Professor of Sociology, University of Sheffield, UK

Author Bio

Neroli Colvin (1965-2018) was a cultural studies of education scholar at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia. She conducted research into the impact of cultural diversity and practices of multiculturalism on schooling in regional areas.