Rural Research Insights from our Post-doctoral Scholar

Laticia Chapman-Rainway, PhD, is the ACSRC’s second post-doctoral scholar.  She defended her thesis just a few months ago, though has been working as a researcher with ACSRC director Clark Banack, PhD and Cornell University’s Dionne Pohler, PhD for the past year. Her primary research field is political theory, her dissertation was on rural libraries and she has switched gears into formal social science work over the past year to assist Banack and Pohler in their rural ethnography project. Ethnography is a qualitative research method involving in-depth, long-term immersion in a group's natural environment to understand their culture, behaviors, and social interactions from an insider's perspective.  This project’s focus explores political opinions in rural spaces; Laticia has been and is involved in all phases of the project from data collection, coding, analysis and writing. 

The methodology of this project necessitates the ability to build trust and to connect with people beyond what is presented on the surface. Laticia spent a lot of time talking with women, seniors, and younger people.  She visited many community spaces: libraries, local museums and cultural spaces, protests, rallies, community and social events, along with town council meetings.  There were 7 rural communities across Canada selected for this project, Laticia visited two of them, one in BC and one in Ontario.  Her preferred locations for this work were in public libraries, coffee shops, and social events, as “they are a good place to connect with people who are plugged into different parts of the community.”  Being in these spaces was just the start, to move beyond she needed to be actively curious and open. In her curiosity she tried to be careful to let people tell her what was really on their minds, and not just what they thought she might want to hear. To get to the heart of the matter, you have to get past people’s public selves into a more personal sphere. This meant first focusing on current situations at the community level, the things that touch people’s daily lives and are topical, she would often open with  “what are the things that are happening in the community right now that people are talking about?.”  This approach allowed her to maintain an open curiosity and to allow the conversation to unfold naturally, while she listened for the politics to bubble to the surface, without expectation. 

Laticia shares that as an interviewer she had to step outside of a common framing around rural communities, one that assumes “rural communities are problems in one way or another”.  Her mindset regarding rural communities and the people who live in them, is neither romanticized nor viewed as a lost cause. She acknowledges that rural communities do have struggles involving the loss of services and marginalization but shares a piece that she believes often gets missed “rural people are trying and they care, community matters to them” and there is “a strong belief that people have in their own agency” to create change.   

When asked what she sees emerging out of the research, she shares that she notices  concepts of community.  “It is different from local government, you cannot see it but you can point to it.” The ‘it’ has a nebulous form but includes “people’s involvement, showing up, volunteering and keeping things running.”  Laticia acknowledges that this has been written about and studied in academia but emphasizes that “one of the things that hasn’t really been written about is that the community is a political space - as in, a space where there are different opinions and ideas about what is important and what to do being negotiated - and who the community includes is more political.” There is an “aspect of people wanting to be in their community and involved in their community as a way of expressing their agency.” She adds that how the community answers this question is very important to that community's survival. The work a community does in finding the answers and responding accordingly “is not an optional thing that just benefits one person, it benefits everyone.” 

The research team is currently in the analysis and writing phase of this work and will be submitting the final product to related journals.