Readings from a Life: Rural Educators Read our Rural Selves is a cultural study of identity in place in Atlantic Canada. The study is developed based on hybrid methodology drawing on key elements of literary anthropology, self-study, autobiography, auto-ethnography, and geo-poetics. The literary landscape of rural Nova Scotia provides the principal site for the readings which are developed throughout in contrapuntal fashion, that is to say the readings move back and forth between global and local representations of rural space. Key to the development of each of the chapters is the concept of distance as a device for making the world strange and therefore knowable. The readings are contained within seven chapters based on the research question, 'What are you doing here?' This question is deconstructed first through establishing the literary landscape of rural Nova Scotia as a site for analysis, followed by a discussion of literary anthropology as method, which leads in turn to a close examination of how particular teachers read themselves through their engagement with the literary texts. These readings are followed by a critical examination of what kinds of reading count in official policy discourses when compared to the more literary representations. As self-study the readings are used to provide insight into a life lived for the most part in rural Nova Scotia and at the same time are used to highlight aspects of education and teacher identity in this place. The concluding chapter moves recursively in order to strengthen the insights contained in the previous chapters and at the same time articulates the ambivalent nature of the project as a whole. Policy implications, potential beneficiaries, limitations of the study, and future directions are indicated in the final chapter.

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