Lexington Books
Pages: 300
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9¼
978-0-7391-9842-1 • Hardback • October 2015 • $143.00 • (£110.00)
978-0-7391-9843-8 • eBook • October 2015 • $135.50 • (£105.00)
Wendy Geller is director of analysis and data management at the Vermont Agency of Education and research fellow at the Center for Research on Vermont at the University of Vermont.
Chapter 1: “Successful Selves”: What the Future Holds
Chapter 2: The Leave-taking Imperative and the Perception of “Choice”
Chapter 3: Strategic Thinking, Teachers, and the Psychic Cartography of Social Class
Chapter 4: Resources, Family, and Parental Relationships
Chapter 5: “Success” in Rural Schools: High-Achievers in Context
Conclusions
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). . . . Geller’s 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.
— Association for Feminist Anthropology
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 local–global 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.
— James Côté, University of Western Ontario
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.
— Barbara Pini, Griffith University