#RuralGazes: an Autoethnography of Our Ways of Seeing

In the context of ongoing concerns that rural studies privileges certain perspectives, four mid-career academics from this field developed a methodology, #ruralgazes, to grasp how our personal, cultural, and academic backgrounds and positionalities influence our understanding of the rural. Integrating collaborative autoethnography with photo elicitation, we take (mostly self-taken) rural-themed photographs, assign descriptive, personal, academic, and political hashtags to them, and use these hashtags as a jumping-off point for an in-depth discussion. In the pilot study presented here, we explore how, in response to a particular photograph, we find ourselves looking with and against various academic and social gazes.