Gender and rural governance

This chapter considers the implications of global social change for a variety of institutions that serve as sponsors of literacy in rural spaces. Such sponsors include schools and universities, but also religious organisations, social clubs and activist groups. The literate individual, as both a fixed truth and a moving target, has been used for decades to devalue rural places and people, and such practices conceal the rich and specific nature of rural literacies. Hedberg and do Carmo reference this to new forms of spatial mobility, in association with what are now acknowledged as widely prevailing [p]rocesses of globalisation, economic restructuring and continuing urbanization. In particular, in a new world order of global digital networks and constant mobility, it is important, and indeed increasingly urgent, to think carefully and creatively about the affordances of information and communication technologies in harnessing and mobilising rural knowledge, culture and capacity in ways that resist marginalisation and the power of the pre-constructed.