Rurality, Diversity and Schooling

Migration and refugee settlement policies have brought significant demographic changes to some regional centres over the past two decades, and Rurality, Diversity and Schooling 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. However, 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 town’s 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 explores a host of anxieties in the town and its schools about recent demographic changes. It reveals 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.