Rural Young Women, Education, and Socio-Spatial Mobility Landscapes of Success [Hardcover]

Geller contextualizes her research into high school girls attitudes and career plans within a sophisticated overarching framework that weaves globalization perspectives with debates about constructions of the self, social reproduction in stratified societies, and mobility (both social and geographic). . . . Gellers contention that schooling can enable agentive women to resist notions of marriage and motherhood as the only options for adult women may indeed reflect a challenge to the dominant patriarchy in both nations where she conducted research.In Rural Young Women, Education, and Socio-Spatial Mobility, Wendy Geller undertakes an impressive synthesis of diverse literatures in order to make sense of the complexities of identity formation among rural young women as they confront the challenges of late-modern societies and their localglobal influences. The focus on how high-achieving secondary-school students derive meaning in their current lives, and how this relates to their perceptions of identity horizons, is particularly illuminating. This qualitative study is especially well-situated in the growing literature concerning how, locally and globally, young women are increasingly outperforming their male peers.?In this book Wendy Geller adds a rich and dynamic qualitative dimension to the numerical data that have charted the out-migration of young women from rural areas. ?Drawing on case studies from rural Vermont and Ireland, she details the complex set of practices by which high-achieving female secondary students construct future biographies tied to leaving their country towns. In an analysis informed by both the importance of structure and agency in shaping the lives of rural youth she demonstrates the intimate and complex connections between the local and the global.??This book explores structural constraints and the possibility of agency by examining the psychic landscapes of social class among educationally high-achieving girls in rural Leinster, Ireland lã%