Sunday, June 6, 2021

Article about rural students wins American Sociological Association prize

Jasmine Whiteside (PhD candidate at Ohio State University) won the best grad student paper award from the American Sociological Association's Section on Sociology of Education.  The paper is titled "Becoming Academically Eligible:  University Enrollment Among First Generation, Rural College Goers," and it was published in 2020 in Rural Sociology.

The abstract follows:  

Abstract Scholarship on first-generation students from rural areas has largely analyzed educational barriers to college going and completion rather than acknowledge the unique matriculation process and sources of support that aid in circumventing educational barriers. Building on prior educational mobility literatures and utilizing an anti-deficit achievement framework, I draw from 20 in-depth interviews with first-generation, rural students to analyze support structures and the strategies these students employed to bypass class, race and geographic barriers to college enrollment. As my findings highlight, these students had limited access to college preparatory materials and classes while in high school, yet they and their families employed creative strategies and mechanisms that counteracted the educational resources they were lacking. My discussion highlights these strategies and mechanisms, and I conclude by suggesting future research directions—directions that recognize both challenges and opportunities for college going rural student populations.

Whiteside, who is from Mississippi, is active in the Rural Sociological Society.   On Twitter, she called her article a "qualitative paper on rural intersectional experiences," implying that these are the sorts of papers that often don't win such prizes.  

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