Ourselves, Our Rivals Unsettling Communities During Rural School Consolidation Casey Thomas Jakubowski Abstract This chapter examines the hidden transcripts (Scott in Domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1990) which emerged after the attempted school consolidation of two communities in the rural USA following the Great Recession of 2008. Exploring the official school doc- uments, media reporting, and online conversation, patterns emerged demonstrating a miss alignment between the official story supporting consolidation and a ‘hid- den transcript’ in opposition. Using case study (Yin in Case study research and applications. Sage, New York, 2012) analysis to tell this one consolidation outcome allows researchers to hear voices not normally represented in rural areas. This chapter explores how resistance to consolidation emerged and how rural areas, continuously engaged in consolidation studies, are unsettled and therefore lose cohesion. With deep emotional commitment, believers define themselves by their organizational affil- iation, and in their bond to other believers they share an intense sense of the unique. (Clark 1972, p. 183) Introduction Rural communities often adopt the identity of the school districts which serve the local area. In the USA, research conducted by leading members of the academy into the relationship between schools and their communities has changed the accepted notion that a rural school is defective or deficient (Biddle and Azano 2016). Addi- tionally, the notion of a monolithic rural has gradually withered away. Rural can mean a wide number of definitions, many of which move beyond the urbancentric (Fulkerson and Thomas 2013) approach of ‘not a city’. In USA-based research, the National Center for Educational Statistics definition of ‘Rural areas are designated by the Census Bureau as those areas that do not lie inside an urbanized area or urban cluster’ (NCES 2006). Nor within educational discussions is there a universal agree- ment about what pathway is right for a community. To some outsiders, a rural area C. T. Jakubowski (B ) State University of New York, Albany, USA e-mail: cjakubowski@albany.edu © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 S. Pinto et al. (eds.), Interdisciplinary Unsettlings of Place and Space, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6729-8_7 101