Abstract

This article explores the creation of a digital storymap tracing the author’s journey as a white, queer, and transfemme college student from a rural background. Prompted by a graduate school narrative, the project revisits and reframes the story using the framework of queer rural liminality (QRL), which understands queerness, rurality, and liminality as co-constitutive and dynamic. Using ArcGIS StoryMaps—a digital storytelling platform—the project weaves together images, theory, personal narrative, and past writings to represent the fluidity of place, queerness, and rurality. Through restorying the author’s educational journey as a queer rural college student, the storymap resists binary assumptions of rurality and queerness as being incompatible. It demonstrates how educational environments can serve as sites of resistance and possibility for queer rural college students. In doing so, the project contributes to emerging scholarship on queer rural student experiences and illustrates how digital storytelling can be a powerful tool for identity exploration and meaning making in educational contexts.

How to Cite:

Christiaens, R., (2025) “Queer Rural Liminality: Storymapping My Educational Journey as a Queer Rural College Student”, Journal of Research in Rural Education 41(6), 1–4. doi: https://doi.org/10.26209/JRRE4106-02

Rights: Copyright