bell hooks, in Teaching to Transgress, exposes the disembodied character of most academic teaching, the emotional heart discarded, set aside in order to offer facts. A learning environment that cancels emotions discounts students of color because students are not contextualized. They become flat, devoid of their outside concerns and life situations. This work is based in the heart and to overcoming geographic, cultural, class, and racial fissures between student populations.
Subsequent to the 2016 election the media gave relentless attention to differences between rural and urban voters, highlighting racial, cultural, and geographic fissures between them and transforming rural and urban people into political foes while sealing intolerance between them. These characterizations often ignored that rural and urban dwellers have significant economic and existential commonalities that are especially apparent on college campuses, where students of many sorts meet and interact, making college campuses especially promising spaces for overcoming racial, cultural, and political divides. Since rural and urban identities inform how students experience college at the same time as they evolve through it, the question is, Can these identities contribute to overcoming political, racial, and geographic chasms and to a more constructive public sphere?
Oral histories lie behind this project, chronicling the lives of students at the University of Kentucky, West Virginia University, University of Florida, and University of Mississippi who come from rural or urban communities. These interviews were conducted by myself and twelve UK students who themselves come from rural (Appalachia and western KY) and urban (Chicago, D.C.) backgrounds. The focus of the project—rural-urban divides and class differences—entered both the interviews and the process itself. The stories of the interviewed students were the stories of the students interviewing them. We delved into difficult terrain including student hunger, racism on campuses, and student poverty, among other weighty matters.
