Editorial Introduction: Recognizing the Rural

t is my honour to be the guest editor of ACT 15 (4), a special issue highlighting rural music education scholarship and research.As an emerging scholar, I am grateful to Vincent Bates for the opportunity to edit this issue and I take this opportunity to thank him for our many stimulating conversations over the past few years, which have enriched my understanding of the diversity of rural music education practices.In this introduction, I draw from literature in cultural geography, rural sociology, and rural education to situate the articles in this issue.Soja (2010) has cogently argued that, "The urban condition has extended its influence to all areas: rural, suburban, metropolitan, exurban, even wilderness, parkland, deserts, tundra, and rain forest" (6).Critical rural sociologists suggest that this pervasiveness of the urban condition is not an impartial state of affairs.Rather, it is driven by urbanormativity-the assumption "that the interests of the cities are of paramount importance, [and] that urban cultural norms and values are not only dominant but superior as well" (Fulkerson and Thomas 2014, 5).From the urbanormative standpoint the rural is depicted as that which the city is not-a wild, but simple, homogenous "out there"-existing only to supply city dwellers with the resources and food that they require, and the opportunities for rest and recreation they desire.This historic urban 1 bias is deeply and invisibly embedded in both language 2 and the human psyche.According to Fulkerson and Thomas (2014), urbanormativity has been packaged "in such a way that it seems normal, natural, and even desirable" (17), and is reinforced in the social imaginary by media depictions of rural people as backward, poor, and ignorant (e.g., country bumpkin, hick, redneck, from the boonies) or rural places as bucolic (e.g., escape from reality, place for recreation).I