Jarvis Marlow-McCowin: So when I think about rurality and being rural today, I think much more about geography, I think about identity, I think about belonging, I think about memory. The ways that, that places we come from really continue to shape how we see ourselves and, and how we move through the world. And so I wanted to kind of hit on that, the cultural ways, uh, that we talk about rurality because that is meaningful. And as a qualitative researcher that, and, and, and what Ty shared, having students and other research participants be able to name and self-identify what rural means to them is such rich data when we think about adding more definitions of how we think about being rural and, and rurality.

Keith Edwards: Hello, and welcome to Student Affairs NOW. I’m your host, Keith Edwards. Rural students are on every college campus, and yet they remain largely invisible in our equity conversations, our institutional design, and our student affairs practice.

Today, I’m joined by three scholars who are changing that. Elise Cain, Jarvis Marlowe McCowin, and Ty McNamee have each dedicated their work to understanding what it actually means to come from a rural place, to carry that identity into college environments that were largely not built with them in mind, and to navigate the cultural, racial, and class distances and more within higher education.

We’ll talk about place-based identity, urban normativity, the strengths rural students bring that institutions too often overlook, and what it would mean to stop treating rural students as problems to be solved and start recognizing the responsibility campuses have to meet them. If you work in student affairs, teach in higher education, or care about who belongs on campuses, this one is for you.

Student Affairs NOW is a premier podcast and online learning community for thousands of us who work in, alongside, or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode or browse the archive at studentaffairsnow.com.

This episode is sponsored by Evolve. Evolve offers four leadership coaching journeys designed to expand capacity and build c- capabilities, empowering courageous leadership to transform institutions and reimagine the future of higher education. My name’s Keith Edwards. My pronouns are he, him, his. I’m a speaker, author, and coach, and I help higher education leaders transform institutions and create better tomorrows for us all.

I’m recording this from my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is at the intersections of the Dakota and the Ojibwe people’s homelands. I’m excited to welcome in our guests. Thanks to the three of you for your work and for being with us today. We’re gonna begin with Elise. I joked before we hit record that this is all your fault.

A friend of the show’s, George McClellan, saw me at ACPA and said, “You’ve got to talk to Elise. Her research is so interesting and so important.” And then you recommended these other great folks. So thanks for making this possible, Elise. Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about you?

Elise J. Cain: Yeah. Hi, everyone.

My name is Dr. Elise Cain. My pronouns are she and her. And I am an associate professor at Georgia Southern University. I also serve as our EdD in Educational Leadership program director. So if anyone’s looking for a fully online EdD program, I always have to recruit, right? And my research strands are that I study college students who come from rural areas, place-based identities, and STEM education.

And prior to becoming a faculty member, I actually worked in student affairs in residence life and housing, as well as leadership programs and campus activities. And b- given today’s topic, I also like to share that I grew up in the town of Schенеctus, New York, which is a rural, remote area in central New York State, and a lot of this study comes from a me study.

It’s about me. It’s about m- my upbringing and my transition to and through college, and now teaching other professionals in higher education. And I’m really excited to be joined by my two wonderful colleagues, and I’ll let them introduce themselves

Keith Edwards: Yeah, go ahead, Ty. Over to you.

Ty C. McNamee: All right. Thanks so much again for having me.

I’m super excited. When anybody wants to talk about rural, I’m always like, let’s talk.” Let’s do it … again, my name is Ty McNamee. My pronouns are he, him, and his. I am an assistant professor in Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation at the University of Kentucky. I’m also a research associate at the University of Kentucky’s Office of Higher Education Research, and I have to give a plug to the Rural Talent Development and Attraction Lab, which we just call the Rural Talent Lab.

There’s a bunch of us across the country working on this lab and I’m co-PI and research fellow for that lab. So I actually get to go to rural Montana next week and do some data collection for that lab, so it’s going on as we speak. I– This really this interest in, rural and rural students really stemmed from my background.

I know I always joke that people will always hear my story of how I grew up and where I went to college ’cause it really impacted what I do for my research and my advocacy now. But I’m from a very small town in Wyoming, Shoshoni, Wyoming. It used to be about six hundred and thirty-five, now I think it’s four hundred and seventy-one people the last time I visited.

And I grew up on a farm and ranch, a working class rural student myself. And then I went to our flagship University of Wyoming in that state, and I had a really tough time my first year. I almost went on academic probation. I almost transferred out of that institution. And I always give credit to faculty and staff and family and friends that helped me through that, and that’s what sort of spawned my like, “I wanna help other students like me who struggled in higher education,” and how can I do that?

So I pursued my master’s in higher education and student affairs at the University of Connecticut. And then I always give a shout-out to Dr. Milagros Castillo-Montoya ’cause I stayed after class to ask her about, what should I do after my master’s degree, and she was the first one that was like, “You can do your doctorate.

You can study higher ed. What are you interested in?” And that’s when I started saying, “I’m really interested in rural, poor, and working class students like me, and I wanna talk about this more.” So that’s really what I started to do in my doctoral program at Teachers College at Columbia University, and since then I’ve been on the tenure track at the University of Min- Mississippi and now at the University of Kentucky.

But throughout that time in academia, really this sort of idea of rural higher education including college access, success, and equity for rural students as well as college teaching and learning and faculty development at rural post-secondary institutions has become the crux of my research agenda.

And like I said, I’m excited to always talk about that. So it’s a personal, interest of mine, but it’s really transformed into a professional interest of mine, and I’m excited to talk about it today. So thanks.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Thanks, Ty. How about you, Jarvis?

Jarvis Marlow-McCowin: Yeah. First Student Affairs NOW, Keith, ev- everyone else, thank you so much for amplifying rural education and rural research theory and practice.

I’m Jarvis. I use he/him/his pronouns. Originally from a small town in central Virginia, Columbia, Virginia. Population less than 200. And it’s one of those no stoplight. At the time, my upbringing, a little bit more dirt roads than paved roads. But that community continues to pour into me and shape me in the person that I am.

I’m a scholar practitioner whose career has taken them from community college to small privates. Most recently served at Cornell University in the Dean of Students Office. A- and now I currently work in the private sector where I get to partner with K12 schools and colleges particularly those that are in rural located areas and to support their overall ecosystem to enhance strategic culture, belonging, diversity, equity, and inclusion work.

So it’s really good to have the hand into that work to still have my connection with supporting rural students and rural educators in schools. Born and raised again, like I said, in Virginia, attended a large research institution in the state capital Virginia Commonwealth University.

Go Rams. It was that undergrad experience where I was involved and got the student affairs itch. The student affairs bug caught me, so I went to the University of Iowa. Go Hawkeyes. Earned my master’s there in higher ed and student affairs. Did some work for a little bit and then went and pursued and then earned my PhD at Binghamton University.

Go Bearcats. And that’s where I got to meet was introduced to Elise and got to meet some other rural scholars and that really shaped my research identity of taking on agenda, of doing some research and then making sure that as I climb, I can lift others through my scholarship.

So again, thank you, and looking forward to the conversation.

Keith Edwards: Wow. Those are great. You can tell that we’ve got not only experts here, but people with lived experience and passion and commitment to this issue, so I love to hear it. Years ago, I used to do a help facilitate a rural economic development forum in Minnesota with people from all over the state working on rural economic development.

And one of the things that was really fascinating over the years of doing that is- What is rural? And mostly people identify other people as rural. We were sharing growing up in small towns. I grew up in a town of 89 people, so I think I just won a prize. You won, yeah. Yeah. That happened. A town of 89 people, but I didn’t think I was rural ’cause I was a town kid.

So the rural was the people who live out on the farm, and by any definition, a town of 89 people would be considered rural. But that’s not how I thought about it. And so Ty one of the things we do with dissertation research, with any research project, as a co-PI on a research project is we gotta define our terms.

So I’m super curious, how do we define rural?

Ty C. McNamee: Yes, and this is the question I think I get most often especially with folks that are not in the rural sphere. I don’t think it’s combative in a way, but I think it’s more like a how do we know what’s rural if we’re gonna include them in these conversations?

And I just actually published a chapter in the, and I always have to get the na- exact name right, The Higher Education Handbook of Theory and Research and it’s about how we define rurality and why it’s important to do that. And I’ll give a shout-out to my student co-authors, Shadman Islam and Austin Van Horn because they really helped me through like how do we think about defining rurality when we’re talking about this in higher education, especially higher education student success and access.

And the first sort of point we made in this chapter that I always make to people is it’s hard to define any social construct or any social demographic. You can say that we have these boxes that people click, but we know that those boxes are not always representative of people’s experiences and backgrounds.

And so the biggest point that we try to make is just because it may be hard to define rurality as a social construct doesn’t mean you shouldn’t include it, ’cause that means you’re literally excluding almost, 10 million public school students across the country that are from rural areas.

And so that’s my biggest piece of advice there. But as you actually look to define rurality, we broke it down into, as researchers would, quantitative, qualitative, and this sort of mixed methods way of looking at things. And so you’re gonna find that there are a variety of governmental organizations and other sort of organizations and associations that have these quantitative ways of saying this is rural and this is urban, and this is suburban.

Maybe they might even say metro and non-metro. And so it’s important as you go through these sort of quantitative definitions to look at what– how they actually define them and what they’re using as those markers. So the National Center for Education Statistics, they have their breakdown of urban suburban, town, and rural.

A lot of folks try to in incorporate the town and rural together, which I don’t think is a bad idea, but they do separate those, so they– people sometimes quantitatively include them together. And then they actually have subsets within each of those. So you’ll see that rural is like fringe and remote and distant.

And so there are these ways that you can quantitatively figure out, what is rural and what’s not and that’s helpful. But then there are other things that sort of go along a spectrum. And so when we’re talking about the rural-urban continuum co- codes that people have, they’ll say, “Oh no, it’s a spectrum from urban to rural.”

And but then you have to decide where are you gonna cut that spectrum off as to say what’s rural and what’s not. And so again, that’s important if you’re thinking about a quantitative large scale data set or a portion of students, that if you wanna use that, you can use students- Home county codes, area codes, et cetera.

But I fall in the qualitative sphere. And so when I when I go to do qualitative research, we’ve oftentimes asked students to self-identify as rural. And so what we have them do is say why are you rural and why do you classify yourself as rural?” And we ask them more about what ru- rurality means to them.

And I don’t think quantitative or qualitative one is better than the other, but I think it’s just like where are you falling in your research questions or the practice questions and policy questions that you’re asking, and how can make sure that you’re figuring out how you define it and that you’re using markers for rurality when you’re doing that defining.

The only other thing I’ll add is that we do have these mixed methods ways that some of us have done in the field where we say, okay, we have a student self-identify as rural. They maybe fill out a demographic questionnaire for us at the beginning of our research, but then we go through and check their hometown and look, does it fall within some of these codes that, the National Center for Education Statistics or the RUCA codes, those sorts of things, to say, okay, maybe you actually might fall more into the suburban/urban category, but tell us more about why you define yourself as rural, or maybe you’re not exactly right for this exact, research project or policy or practice effort.

That’s not to say we’re excluding folks, but we’re just making sure that, again, we’re centering on rural students and what rurality might be to them, even though we know it’s messy, so it’s not always gonna be perfect. I’d love my, people here in the conversation today to talk more about how we define rurality, but that sort of like broad overview of how we define it quantitatively, qualitatively, and mixed methods was really helpful for me, and I hope it’s helpful to other folks as you think about going into the field and really targeting your pal- practice and policy to rural students.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. That’s super comprehensive. Go ahead, Jarvis.

Jarvis Marlow-McCowin: E- exceptional response- Yeah … I must say.

Keith Edwards: That’s tough to follow- … isn’t it? Tough to follow. Yeah.

Jarvis Marlow-McCowin: We wrote about this

Elise J. Cain: a couple of times.

Jarvis Marlow-McCowin: Yeah. And I- Yeah. Yeah … I must say, I you might not remember, Ty, the Clemson University’s recent… You keynoted that, and I knew- Yeah

the direction you were gonna go, so I tried to think of how I could chime in here, and I knew- Absolutely … at least would be able to add a lot more nuance. For me, I kind of wanna touch a little bit a- about how, K- Keith, how you framed the question. And for me, I grew up never identifying or never using the word rural.

I grew up using the more cultural ways of articulating. So being from the country meant that I was country or I would highlight and friends would say, you’re that small town kid,” or but I never conceptualized that as being what one of the a technical definition from a government perspective is anything not urban.

And which is such a fascinating thing to really think about of a place, that it has much more value when we think… And we’ll talk about urban normativity much later. But again, rural was never really a word I used growing up, and it certainly wasn’t something that I thought about as a place-based identity or part of my socialized identities.

Really wasn’t something until much later when I was invited by a student who was from New York City, who, and Elise and I co-authored a chapter about this, where that student invited me to think a lot more critically about my sense of self, and she just said, “I feel like where we’re from matters.”

And then I started to think about where am I from, and how does that correlate and connect to who I am? And so I think about comparing You know, the, my hometown to the places I saw on television, imagining tall buildings, bright lights, life in the city. So again that urban normativity of was central to my own understanding of rurality which again, I’m continuing to chisel at.

So when I think about rurality and being rural today, I think much more about geography, I think about identity, I think about belonging, I think about memory. The ways that, that places we come from really continue to shape how we see ourselves and how we move through the world. And so I wanted to hit on that, the cultural ways that we talk about rurality because that is meaningful.

And as a qualitative researcher that and what Ty shared, having students and other research participants be able to name and self-identify what rural means to them is such rich data when we think about adding more definitions of how we think about being rural and rurality. But I know I’d love to hear what Elise has to say based on-

Keith Edwards: I just want to say that, that it’s really startling to me to hear that the governmental definition is anything that’s not rural, right?

Like how we identify non-white students, right? By, just by centering the norm, and anything deviates from that norm, then the implication is deviant. And it’s reminding me this binary definition of urban and then not urban-

…

Keith Edwards: Is a binary. And Bell Hooks, Yeah … a big ur- a big rural advocate.

Yes. Bell Hooks reminds us through, always reminds me through our colleague Rachel Wagner from Clemson. So we’re getting a lot of shout-outs in, that binary thinking is always dominator thinking, right? Yeah. And so how do we begin to expand

Jarvis Marlow-McCowin: that? And so you mentioned Bell Hooks, Belonging: A Cultural Place.

Yeah. It’s one of her books where she talks about her rural Kentucky identity, leaving Kentucky, realizing that I’m really finding out more and more about who I am and my place-based identity, and then returning back to Kentucky in the latter part of the year. So I just had to give that- Yes …

Ty C. McNamee: as- Yes.

Elise J. Cain: Yes. Yeah No, that’s great. And I think that it is. It’s complex. It’s multifaceted. And my work, I don’t think that even myself growing up in, we were talking about h- the populations of our hometowns. Another thing that I’ve heard a lot of folks talk about is how many folks they grad- graduate high school with.

Yes. And so for me, that was 30 students in my gra- high school graduating class, and that’s another marker that we tend to just say, and that’s the social or cultural aspect. And so it, it can sometimes be social spatial, demographic. It can be economic definitions. Yeah. It can be political definitions, the cultural definitions, the social definitions.

And it is messy, but I think there’s beauty in that mess. And allowing people, like you would other identities, to really have it speak to them. And, I’ll just say, even when I introduced myself, I was chuckling when Ty mentioned the National Center for Education Statistics because I say Schodack, New York, it’s a rural, remote location because that has just worked its way into my verbiage as a way to explain where I’m from.

Yes. But again, that’s because I’ve read those definitions. And there’s a really great school lookup if anyone… They have a really wonderful website if anyone ever wants to look up how, where their school and where it’s located. But again, I didn’t even think about this as a topic until I was in my doctoral program.

Yeah. And I was, it’s I went to Binghamton University, and my degree is in community and public affairs. And I kept being asked my first year of my doctoral program, “Who is your community?” And at first, I just answered, “College students.” I love college students, I worked in higher education and student affairs.

But then I went to a a presentation at ACPA, and I was introduced to the work by Fulkerson and Thomas, actually it’s Thomas et al., Critical Rural Theory. And I read that book, and I said, “This is speaking my language. This, I need to study rurality and learn more about this.” And this was about 2017.

There wasn’t a whole lot in our literature in higher education, and just education- Yeah … more broadly, about rural students. And so I said, “This, I need to start digging, and we need to know l- more about this.” And I’m glad that other colleagues have had that same realization that we need to start more, talking more about this.

And so that has led us here today.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Yep. If you’re having a hard time keeping up with all the name-dropping and all the references- … we’ll get all of this in the show notes, so go to the episode page at studentaffairsnow.com.com. You’ll be able to find all of that there. Elyse, this is, this conversation is all your fault, as we said, through George McClellan.

But you’ve written, Elyse, about rural place-based identity. Tell us about this.

Elise J. Cain: Yeah, absolutely. First I want to acknowledge another, name drop, but we all stand on the shoulders of giants in academia, correct? And so I want… we build upon the work of others. And for me, the work of others that has really spoken to me and led me down this pathway is Fulkerson and Thomas.

And Fulkerson and Thomas are sociologists at the State University of New York at Oneonta, which interestingly enough, I actually worked professionally for eight years on the student affairs side of the world in housing and campus activities, leadership programs, and didn’t realize that until after I discovered their book a couple of years later.

And so it’s funny how life works out that way sometimes. But my place-based identity model builds off of their work, and I said when I read their work, I said, “This is speaking to me.” And what I, when I talk to college, my own experience, when I talk to other college students who come from rural i- identities rural places, my I wrote the piece.

And so the place-based identity model is in the new directions for student services in the, actually, the fall/winter 2020 ch- monograph. And so it has been out there a couple of years. You, everyone has free access online, so I hope you go check it out. But really, I put a model or an image to some of the work that they were working on, and then I continued to refine it through my scholarship.

And really where my lens is, I w- I think specifically about college students. But really the model, there’s three important components. And the first component is the objective component. So we think about, we were just talking about how do you define rurality? The first th- part is that objective component, where it’s places of residence, types of occupation.

It’s those tangible things that you can say, “My high school was this. My zip code is this. My county is this. This is the type of work that I do.” And that really exists on a continuum from rural to urban But then there’s also this other part of place-based identity, which is the subjective component, and that comes more from the socially constructed, those social and cultural understandings of what place means.

And that also can exist on a continuum from rustic to urbane. And those, that language is borrowed from Fulkerson and Thomas, who also then borrowed it from Ching and Creed, who published their article, I think, in 1996 or 1997. So again, building upon the work of others. And what’s fantastic about these two components and why we had that messy conversation and that very complex and understanding of rurality is that those two components, they can sometimes completely overl- overlap.

So maybe you grew up in really rural areas, you identify as a really rural person with what that means to you, and they completely a- align. They can somewhat align as well, be somewhere in the middle, but they can also be totally opposite. So maybe you grew up in a a rural area, you have that strong cultural understanding, but now you live in Atlanta or New York City or some of those places that we would definitely identify as very urban.

And it makes that complexity and that understanding that identity is fluid. It changes. It’s on a continuum, it’s fluid, it changes at any moment. It also can change across one’s lifespan. And an important component of the model is that your understanding of your place-based identity is encompassed with urban normativity.

And we’ve talked about urban normativity, and some folks listening might be like, “What is urban normativity?” So urban normativity was c- coined by Thomas and Fulkerson, and really it’s that it’s a system of urban normativity, so it’s a structural like the hegemon- hegemony of the… That it’s normal for…

Urbanization is normal. And so what that does then is it relinquishes anything that’s maybe rural to be inferior or subpar. And so it’s this understanding that you have this objective and subjective component of your place-based identity, but then how you understand your place-based identity is also influenced by urban normativity.

And please read the article. There’s lots more details, but I invite my colleagues to share some more that they, of their understanding of the place-based identity model and how they’ve used it.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. We’re gonna get to each of your kind of specialties, so thanks for sharing yours, Elise. Jarvis, Ty, anything you wanna add in here about this?

Jarvis Marlow-McCowin: Yeah, I’ll just go really quickly. For me, one, I just really appreciate Allyssa’s work here because it, it gives us as scholars and it gives people p- and particularly student affairs practitioners, I think just an added bonus of when we do new student orientation, social identity development work, to add that place-based component.

And I’ll just echo again my own understanding I’m gonna respond to this question by just sharing a little bit of how I’ve- use the place based identity model on myself, right? And to explore my own identity. So my rural identity was really shaped similar to how we talked about a little bit in Bell Hooks when I left rural Virginia, right?

So when I went to Richmond, Virginia, when I went out to Iowa, when I went to upstate New York and then found myself serving as professional in a rural located environment, and then working with students who were also from a rural environment, and then students who were from, in, in this, that particular institution, majority from New York City.

And again, invited by a student who has had an urban identity to help me think about my sense of place and where I’m from. And so for me, it’s still that fluidity, this, the being on the spectrum, but it’s also being away from something that’s central to my being was shaped when I left that place.

And that’s, I’m continuing to think about. So when I talk to student affairs professionals, always encourage them to really help students think about where they’re from, who’s poured into them, because it’s gonna shape and position them for success. So when the going gets rough, when the challenges come and adversity comes, sometimes when we, to move forward, we need to look back and think in this context, understand our rural roots.

Because there’s so much, we’ll talk about this in a couple of questions, but there’s so much strength and cultural wealth and assets that are in rural communities, from the communities, the people that shape the place, that then can just help students thrive in college. So for me, I’ve used the place-based identity model more on me and thinking about my identity.

But then from a, just a scholarly perspective, much of my work is about student, rural student success at the intersection of students of color. And so thinking about place-based identity and racialization and also gender. Majority of my work focuses on rural Black males. But when I think about place-based identity, when I’m doing research with students, particularly rural Black males, I ask them a lot about, “Tell me a little bit more about where you’re from.

How has that place shaped you? How is it continuing to shape you even though you’re no longer there?” So that’s just a little bit about my reflection both personally and professionally about the place-based identity model. If you haven’t read it, use it, read it, cite it. You’ll love it

Ty C. McNamee: Absolutely.

And Jarvis, what you said, that, that last piece, I know we’re gonna talk about that in this session at some point, but I think that’s really important- Yeah … as we’re talking about these place-based identities and how you define rural, that we’re not just thinking about rurality in specific ways. And I really credit scholars at the beginning of my doctoral career to be like, “Who are you talking about?

Who are you leaving out of the conversations?” Those sorts of things. ‘Cause oftentimes what happens is rural America gets painted as like a white, straight, cisgender Christian population, and we can see from the quantitative data that overall rural America may trend with those demographics.

But then if you start breaking it down by region, by community, who are you leaving out of the conversations? That we have a ton of people of color queer people, et cetera, that live in rural areas, that it’s important that we’re talking about place-based identities, but also, again, I know we’re gonna chat about this in a little bit- Yeah

what might intersect or interplay with those identities. The piece that you brought up that I have been trying to get this publication out forever on, I think that’s really important is that there’s the place-based identity, but I think a lot of students come into understanding themselves maybe through that place-based identity when they’re away from their rural areas.

So I love what you said, where it’s “Oh, now I come to understand more about myself.” And we see that happen all the time in higher ed, that people come into these spaces, they’re growing, they’re developing, they’re around different people, they’re around similar people, and they start to understand what their identities and backgrounds are.

And so that’s what our research has found, is that once those rural students or small town students, country students, however they’re defining themselves, get into non-rural spaces, especially those big research universities, urban universities, those sorts of things they start to understand that, “Whoa, I’m one of the only rural people around here, and now I feel that place-based identity really intensely.”

And that has been across my research that I’ve seen students talk about that, especially when we’re at those sort of places that are more urban normative. And the only last thing that I’ll bring up with that, and I really love that students that I’m on dissertation committees for now are focusing on this, is that when we talk about urban normativity, we’re not saying, “Don’t talk about urban.”

We’re actually saying, it’s great that we’ve been talking about urban spaces and supporting urban spaces, that we’re talking about students from urban spaces. A lot of times they get termed as inner city students, however you wanna define them. But we also see that has dominated the conversation, especially at these large urban universities and especially the selective ones, that we wanna bring rural students up to that same level and so that we can actually see that a lot of these students are facing very similar barriers or have similar experiences, even if they come from very different geographic regions, and we wanna make sure that we’re bringing them both in the conversation so that we are focusing on place-based identity in not just an urban way but also a rural way.

So I love what my colleagues have said. I couldn’t have said it better myself. I’ve cited Elise’s place-based identity model many times, and I hope that people continue to think about that as they work forward in their rural higher education research for sure.

Keith Edwards: And nothing wrong with urban.

What’s, w- what the trouble is when we center it without naming it, right? And so I’m thinking about Zach Foss- Exactly … or Erin’s book on white noise. Let’s… w- nothing wrong with being white, but let’s name it, let’s unpack it, let’s understand it- … let’s see it rather than just make it the default, the norm, which actually dehumanizes everyone- Yeah

along the way. So let’s start- Yeah … let’s stop talking about what we’re gonna talk about and talk about it. Jarvis, your focus is on intersectionality- Yeah. Yeah … of identity and rurality and cultural wealth-based approaches. Tell us more

Jarvis Marlow-McCowin: Yeah. It, it really a premise of, we don’t live single lives, and there are many ways that our identities are connected to one another.

In a really short brief I’m naming one inter-intersectionality as we know it from a systems level stems from critical race theory and more thinking about the multiple ways that overlapping systems like urban normativity, racism, poverty will shape or, and negatively or positively impact some people while simultaneously negatively impacting others.

And in this context, the system of urban normativity, the system of racism, poverty, et cetera negatively impacts folks from rural communities. I’m also naming the multiple dimensions of identity and how, again, there, there are many … All of us, we have some salient identities. We all have social identities that we may think about daily or may not, but they all shape how we’re perceived or how we perceive others or how we navigate the world.

My, my work around naming both multiple dimensions of identity and intersectionality stemmed from my time in undergrad doing undergraduate research, and I was studying the experiences of Black men as they transitioned from high school to college, and what were the factors that helped them succeed. And I was noticing at the time that I didn’t find myself showing up in the research, and what I mean by that is the majority of the research focused on Black males from urban environments or Black males who were at colleges in urban environments, and particularly at HBCUs that were in urban environments.

And so I really didn’t see myself represented and more, more so positively represented. So at the heart of my scholarship is that curiosity from my 19-year-old self at VCU really thinking about what is the experiences of people like me? Because the majority of people that were from my hometown didn’t go off to college, so I just wanted to figure out what was the why for that.

And so my research thinking about intersectionality, thinking about community cultural wealth, it really sits at naming the assets. It … The conversations matter around barriers and challenges, but I found myself wanting to know really how do students succeed, what are the strengths, relationship the community assets that help them persist and thrive.

And then most importantly from a systems level, what are institutions intentionally doing to cultivate and create the conditions for rural students, for this conversation- Creating the conditions for them to be able to thrive on campus beyond just surviving or making it through just because it was some serendipitous manner.

It needed to be intentional. So that curiosity led me to some asset based critical asset based frameworks. First Sean Harper and the Antideficit Achievement Framework Tara Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth and then Loni Crum Crystal Chambers and colleagues with the Rural Cultural Wealth.

So all of these frameworks really shape how I think about my research from a critical asset based perspective, where I really… I name the systems, but I also focus on what are the conditions that help students thrive. We know about the challenges. We know in, in terms of Black men, maybe one of the lowest performing.

And w- what we mean by performing, they maybe have the lowest degree attainment for higher education. At the same time, there’s a population out there who have been successful, and so I wanna figure out and name those experiences so that we can cultivate and replicate that success. And ultimately the scholarship, it’s about helping us tell fuller stories.

Real stories that will recognize strengths, recognize the assets that students bring. And what- when we do that, we also name and position their rural community as a place of value, as a place of full of hope and full of people and things that can help other students make it through to higher education.

So thank you for the question.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. And thank you for that answer and how you’ve modeled that even before the question at the very beginning and how you’ve done that. Allyson and Tyler, could

Elise J. Cain: you try to- I’ll just add on to that. I think that what’s important is, when I think…

We started, we were just talking about the place-based identity model. The place-based identity model is positioning place-based identity as a s- one of the many social identities that folks have, and we know that’s so important in student affairs and higher education. And, I love the model of multiple dimensions of identity or the reconceptualized model of multiple dimensions of identity.

And thinking about how does that place now fit in with all these other identities? Because even on this call today, we all identified as someone who came from a rural area, but when we add our other multiple identities to our experiences, we all have different results. And so- Yeah … I also just wanna make sure that we highlight Jarvis had mentioned Crum et al’s Rural Cultural Wealth model and how that’s really been a wonderful, it has four components of it and really just talks about what is the c- cultural wealth that rural people bring to spaces. And and particularly in thinking about higher education, we can think about rurality as an asset and how can we c- have culturally relevant support for rural students on our college campuses.

And I think that’s leading to even more phenomenal work coming out in the future.

Keith Edwards: Yeah, great.

Ty C. McNamee: Yeah, I was excited that model came out. I actually… Oh, yeah, go ahead. Can you hear me?

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Yeah, go

Ty C. McNamee: ahead. Okay. Perfect. When I I was in my doctoral program, and I started talking with Sonja Ardwen, who’s at Clemson.

Another shout-out to Clemson today. She and I talked about this sort of like anti-deficit strength-based framing of rurality, and we started doing a research project with our, with other colleagues about the strengths that rural students bring to campuses, so we don’t just always frame things as a deficit narrative about rural students.

And that model with from et al. also came out at the same time we were conducting this. So it was very serendipitous. And we were able to use that model to show that rural students are instances that may minoritize them, may mar- marginalize them, may not see that what they bring with rural knowledge and values and understanding is worthwhile.

They may see it as inferior. And it’s not to say that every person in every institution is going to do that, but we were seeing that was coming up at some of their institutions. But in spite of that, they were able to use those sort of four tenets that you were talking about, Elise to succeed in higher education.

And so it’s important that we think about how can we capitalize on what rural students are already bringing, not just go in and say, “We know best. You have all these barriers and obstacles. We can help you.” And, that’s such a deficit way of looking at it. We instead wanted to flip the script and say, “What can we actually capitalize on that these rural students are already bringing?”

So I’m glad that folks are bringing that into the conversation as we talk about rural students, for sure.

Keith Edwards: And I wanna mention we talked about intersectionality. We need to honor Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw and intersectionality as systems. Yeah. With Jarvis, you explained so well. And one of my favorites, Susan Jones, my dissertation advisor on multiple dimensions of identity- Yeah

and on her work with others. Yeah. And I’m I am hearing Alex Lang say, “And those are not the same thing.” Yeah. We conflate multiple dimensions of identity- Yes … and intersectionality. Absolutely. Experiencing systems of oppression is different. Yep. So we got some good folks in here.

Ty C. McNamee: Yeah.

Keith Edwards: So Ty, you’ve been focused on class culture and this crossing of worlds.

Juicy. Go on.

Ty C. McNamee: Yeah. So I love what you just said ’cause it’s a perfect segue because as I was writing my a- actual doctoral dissertation, which shout out, it became a book. So if you wanna buy the book please, always, I’m always happy to have people do that. Buy the book. It’s a much, it’s a much easier read than my dissertation.

My, my committee and I, we were talking about how can we talk about the intersections or the interplays of class, and we’re talking about social class, and rurality. And originally we were like, “Ooh, does intersectionality fit in there?” And then we were “Oh, maybe that’s not the right fit for a model or understanding.”

But then a sociology professor, Oren Pizmony-Levy, he brought to me the theory of cumulative disadvantage, and that’s the idea that across time you might have one identity or life experience that can be I always want to say this structurally and systemically causing you disadvantages.

It’s not the identity or background that’s causing you disadvantages. It’s the structures and systems that Jarvis was talking about before that, that can cause you to have cumulative disadvantage across your lifespan. And if you have more than one of those identities or experiences or background factors, then you c- then you face even more structural disadvantage.

And so when we were talking about rurality and social class, we saw how these identities or background factors or demographic factors, whatever you wanna call them, they were colliding for students in higher education and really affecting their cultural experiences on campus. And so I’m not gonna go way deep, deep into what I talked about in my dissertation, my book.

Again, please read it. I’d love to talk more about it in the future. But what I really was trying to come to understand was we were so focused on rurality in higher education research that we were missing that in modern day rurality, social class has become a very integral part of that.

We should not conflate the two because that’s what happens when you start focusing only on income and social class and leaving out rurality, but we should talk about the connections. So when we think about agriculture and manufacturing that were so big in rural areas for decades, as those have declined and have not been in rural areas as strongly, we see that service area– service industries have become much larger in rural areas, and those are also low paying.

So couple this decline over here with this increase in service industries that are low paying, we have that we see that rural areas are facing some of the highest, if not the highest poverty rates in the country. And that can really impact a student on what they wanna do after graduation and thinking about culturally, should I go to college?

It’s really expensive, it seems. Shouldn’t I just go to work after college? But also I have this cultural background of folks that are telling me, “Go to college.” We’re being cheerleaders. And so there’s all these like cultural interplaying factors happening at one time that can affect students who wanna go to college.

And then once they get to college, it’s a whole other like I’m trying to navigate this space as being from I’m far away. I can’t afford it. Is this for me? And so I was seeing that as these students transition into and tried to navigate their college careers, that there was these rural and social class factors that were really coming together in order to impact their experiences Unfortunately in the negative way quite often when they’re in higher education spaces.

And the last thing I’ll say with that is that the, that interplay is really important because we’ve seen that higher education institutions are trying to focus on social class and income. They’re like, “Oh, we offer scholarships, we offer cohort programs, we offer this, we offer that,” and that is great. But when they left out rurality, they were forgetting, these students aren’t just facing income or social class barriers, they may have to fly hundreds of miles back home and pay all this money to get home over the holiday breaks.

They may be focusing on social class during COVID-19 and saying we got students like storage and we got them, a little bit of money for if they’re trying to navigate this.” But they forgot that those rural poor and working class students also were trying to navigate remote work, having fewer internships back in their hometowns, all these things that were coming in- into an interplay again.

And so that’s why I talk oftentimes when I say about like class and culture and rurality, that these things can really come together and impact students’ higher education experiences.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. What does that bring up for you, Jarvis?

Jarvis Marlow-McCowin: Yeah. I’m thinking about my research with rural Black men, and I think Ty and I, we were in the…

We were in doctoral program around the same time ’cause the- Yep … Carmet et al.’s Rural Cultural Wealth Model came out right when I did my proposal, so I was just super lucky. But so in my research and what’s coming up for me, class, it was present. But it wasn’t like the a primary focus, but it was certainly pervasive.

Some of the collaborators that were participants in my study, they talked about things like sharing meal plans because they didn’t have the financial capital to buy their own meal plan. They talked about photocopying textbooks ’cause they couldn’t afford them on their own. In some cases, i- in one particular young man, he talked about having to sleep in his car because housing, it just wasn’t something that him or his family could afford.

Those are all class conscious decisions at the intersection and connection to their identity. but particularly place based identity of being from a rural area. And that connected to their social class. And so these were their everyday realities. But what really stood out to me in that particular, and then connecting it to, to, to Ty’s great work, it’s not only the challenges, but it’s just the way that students leaned on one another.

Yes … that ingenuity, naming one of the tenets of rural cultural wealth. A- and that’s where we see the connections to also those two, Ty’s work and then the model. Yeah. But it also reminds me that college, it’s not just that, that academic journey. It’s also something that’s very social, cultural, and an economic one.

And so when we understand those realities, and when I say when we, when the system of higher ed and our policymakers and administrators, I believe that we can move much more beyond asking why students are struggling and really start asking those systemic questions of what inst- what institutional responsibility do we have to- better support our students while accounting for all of their identities, including social class at the intersection of being rural.

Ty C. McNamee: Absolutely.

Elise J. Cain: And I love that, Jarvis, and I think about, you talk about institutional, but I even think about the student affairs professionals who might be listening to- Yeah … the conversation today, like working it into our own self-reflections of who are we within, including place as part of the social identity wheel that you might reflect upon your- Yeah

your identities and where your beliefs and values are. And, doing this part of self-reflection, and then bringing it to the students as well and letting students tell you about their stories and what their needs are, and really making it, student success, student centered. And we don’t know that until we talk to the students.

We can start to think about what they may need, but making who they are important and centering them- Yeah … and just making sure that place and rurality is a part of that conversation. And I think that’s a great place for folks to start if they’re thinking about how do I start integrating this into my practice?

Ty C. McNamee: Yes. I love it, Elise, because I always tell folks, even if you’re looking at something like career services, they’re like what would rural have to do with career services?” And you start to go where are you steering students to for jobs? If they’re rural, poor, and working class, and you’re saying we’re gonna get you this really amazing paying job after graduation.

You have to go to a ru- or an urban area,” and that student might wanna move home. They might wanna be close to their family and in a rural area. So how can we re-steer those conversations? If you’re an admissions professional, you’re like we’ve brought the students in. We’re doing fly-ins and, o- orientation program.”

Are you paying for folks to come to those things? How far do folks have to travel to come from the rural areas? Since we know that familialism is such a big piece of the rural cultural wealth model, are we bringing in families? Are we having panels and workshops to talk about what it would be like for those families and those rural students?

And so almost every student affairs entity, really, I always am just like, think rural. Not that you shouldn’t think of other things, but don’t forget to think about rural because there might be different nuances that you’ll have to consider as you create your programs and services for sure.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Awesome. This is super helpful, and I love that you got real practical right there with us, Ty. But we are unfortunately running out of time. The podcast is called Student Affairs NOW. We always like to end by asking what are you thinking, troubling, or pondering now. And if folks want to connect with you, might, where might they be able to do that?

So Jarvis, what are you troubling now?

Jarvis Marlow-McCowin: Yeah. First just gratitude. Thank you-

Keith Edwards: Yeah …

Jarvis Marlow-McCowin: for amplifying rural research and rural theory research and practice. One thing I’m thinking of, I’m just overwhelmed with joy whenever I hear about or meet a doctoral student or a master student who’s thinking about all things rural.

Yeah … because I didn’t have much of that when I was going through. And certainly not in my undergrad, and certainly not while serving as a professional. So I’m just super always grateful when I meet students who are thinking about rurality. And I’m encouraged by the growing body of research that’s adopting critical asset-based frameworks and methodological approaches because that’s going to open up a wave of possibilities that us on this call probably couldn’t even think or imagine that’s where the research is going.

But it- it’s gonna take us to a place that is just so beautiful and certainly impactful on student affairs research. And so I’m just excited about all of that. If you want to continue the conversation, best place you can find me is LinkedIn. But super, super grateful for this opportunity, and thank you to my colleagues.

Ty C. McNamee: Absolutely.

Keith Edwards: How about you, Ty? What are you troubling now?

Ty C. McNamee: Yeah I am not going to bring us down into the dredges of talking about politics all the time, but it’s such an interesting time to be studying rurality. For some reason, rural sort- sort of seems to be an okay t- topic to talk about. But then when you talk about something like, eliminating TRIO programs- Yeah

That there has been hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of rural students served by those programs. So even if you’re not talking about rural, it- it’s happening. And one of those pieces that has been interesting for me is I study queerness and rurality in higher education, and I’m really starting to emerge into the field.

And I love Jarvis’s work about gender and rurality and the intersections of course, social class and race and al- other identities and demographic factors that can come into play there. But right now, what’s troubling me is how do I get the work out there and try to get, funding for that work and folks to understand what’s happening for students that may be at the intersections of queerness and gender and rurality, while also knowing that I literally might not get a federal grant or I might not be able to put this out there in the world without a target being on my back and my co-authors’ back.

And so I’m still leaning into it. In fact, I’m l- I wanna connect with Jarvis after this ’cause I’m like, “We need to talk about the gender and rurality thing,” ’cause that’s been on my main focus right now. But at the same time, I just have to make sure that I’m keeping, myself safe and others safe both professionally but also personally as we put this work out there.

So keep doing the good work and keep yourself safe at the same time, folks. But I’m just, like Jarvis said, so glad that we’re even bringing rurality into these conversations right now, and I hope that people can at least feel that sort of positivity and joy that we can do this work together even in, in turbulent times for sure.

Elise J. Cain: And I’ll just add, I, I think that I love when I talk ruralness with other rural folks ’cause there’s just such a great appreciation. I said, “I don’t know if other types of scholars do this.” Maybe this is because we do reflect where we’re from, and we like that community unity. We like that togetherness that we have, but, and the familialism.

But for me, what I think about all those things, and I’m very thankful to see and very excited to see this as a growing area of research. And I can’t… I’m looking forward to seeing what’s coming out. I know for myself I’m thinking about the place-based identity model 2.0. I’m like- Yeah

What is the reconceptualized place-based identity model? Exactly. Reconceptualize. And I’m working on I’m collecting data, and I’m working on a bigger study that’s geographically very similar to where I collected my original dissertation work. But instead of a research institution, the students attend technical colleges.

And talking to them about their rural i- and they’re in rural areas, these technical colleges, and the difference that makes about the students, their perceptions of rurality and where they’ve come and h- the impact on their place-based identities is just amazing. And so I’m excited to keep working on that.

And I think there’s still more to discover with this topic, and I’m excited that more people are interested in joining. And so thank you to everyone who took the time to listen to today’s podcast, and continue to do the great work.

Keith Edwards: Awesome. Thank you all so much. This has been terrific. The word that’s coming up for me now is abundance.

And I think that ties into the cultural wealth and abundance. There’s just so much that these students bring, and their communities have poured into them, and what they offer, and viewing that with that cultural wealth mindset, not only for them, but what they contribute to others in the community.

So thanks to each of you for your scholarship and for spending the time chatting with us today and chatting with each other. I really appreciate it. Thanks for all that you’re doing in this space.

Ty C. McNamee: Yeah, of course. If people wanna talk more, email me, add me on LinkedIn. I’m happy to do that. I’m always down to talk about rural all the time.

Elise J. Cain: Yeah. And the best way to contact me is email as well, so ecane@georgiasouthern.edu. Please email me, find me. Happy to always have a conversation on the topic.

Ty C. McNamee: Yes.

Keith Edwards: Absolutely. And we’ll have a bountiful show notes on studentaffairsnow.com. So thanks to all of you for your leadership in this space. We also wanna thank our sponsor of this episode, Evolve.

Given the current context of higher education, we need to invest in leaders with the capacity and capabilities to transform their institutions and the future of higher education. The Evolve Institute for Higher Education Leadership offers four leadership coaching journeys tailored to four different leadership levels.

Each is a three-month journey that includes individual and group coaching, plus a curated curriculum of short asynchronous video modules. We also offer Evolve for Leadership Teams. If you are ready to evolve your leadership voice, visit evolveinstitute.com to learn more. As always, a huge shout-out to our producer, Natalie Ambrosey, who does all the behind-the-scenes work to make us all look and sound good.

And we love your support for these conversations. By listening, sharing, and recommending episodes like this, you make all of this possible. You can help us reach even more folks by subscribing to the podcast on YouTube and to our weekly newsletter, where you get each new episode every week on Wednesdays, and sometimes a bonus here’s the story on Tuesday or Thursday.

If you’re so inclined, you can leave us a five-star review. That really helps episodes like this and great conversations like this reach an even larger audience. I’m Keith Edwards. Thanks to the fabulous guests today and to everyone who is watching and lis- listening. Make it a great week. Thank you all.

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Cain, E. J., & Hicks, A. (2025). Where are you from?: Putting scholarship to work through place-based identities. ACPA Developments. 22(1). https://developments.myacpa.org/private7J9pRkXzLq/07/where-are-you-from-putting-scholarship-to-work-through-place-based-identities-cain-hicks/2474/

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Marlow-McCowin, J. & Cain, E. J. (2025). “I feel like where we are from also matters”: Supporting race and place-based identity development on campus. In J. A. McElderry & S. Hernandez Rivera (Eds.). Developing an intersectional consciousness and praxis: Moving toward antiracist efforts in higher education. Information Age Publishing.

Marlow-McCowin, J., Ottley, J., & Pérez II, D. (2021). Translating rural Latinx students’ cultural wealth to college campuses. New Directions for Student Services, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1002/ss.20366

McNamee, T. C. (2025). The cultural journeys of rural, poor and working-class college students: Policy and practice to support degree attainment. Routledge. 

McNamee, T. C., Ardoin, S., Cooper, N. D., & Sansone, V. A. (2025). “Because I’m from a rural background”: an examination of rural students in higher education through a critical, non-deficit framework. The Journal of Higher Education, 1-31. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2025.2455333 

McNamee, T. C., Ardoin, S., & Islem, S. (2026). Fostering culturally engaging campus environments for rural, poor and working-class students in higher education. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 19(2), 120. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2025.2455333 

McNamee, T. C., ⁺Islem, S. & *Van Horn, A. D. (2026). Measuring and defining rurality: Implications for higher education research on rural postsecondary issues. In L. Perna (Ed.), Higher education: Handbook of theory and research. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-05671-9_13 

McNamee, T. C., Willis, J. F., & Davis, R. (2025). Towards a critical rural education line of inquiry: rural spaces as multi-identity contexts. In Handbook on Rural and Remote Education (pp. 399-416). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035307722.00035 

Sorgen, C. H., McNamee, T. C., Tate, B. C., & Shannon-Baker, P. (2024). Supporting queer students from rural backgrounds: Navigating challenges and building resilience in higher education. In Perspectives on transforming higher education and the LGBTQIA student experience (pp. 164-186). IGI Global Scientific Publishing. DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-9914-6.ch009 

Thomas, A. R., Lowe, B. M., Fulkerson, G. M., & Smith, P. J. (2011). Critical rural theory: Structure, space, culture. Lexington Books.

Why Rural Matters Report: https://nrea.net/wrm-2025/ 

National Center for Education Statistics Search for Public Schools: https://nces.ed.gov/ccd/schoolsearch/