On May 9, 2019, Professor Carl Bagley, dean of School of Social Science, Education and Social Work of Queen’s University Belfast, UK delivered a lecture entitled “Rural Space, Identity and Education in Changing Times” for IICE’s International Education Podium. The lecture was chaired by IICE Associate Professor LIU Min and attended by faculty members and graduate students from the IICE.

Prof. Bagley’s lecture mainly revolved around one of her comparative research projects that employed ethnography to investigate life and educational development in Minbury and Cowshill, two rural areas of UK in the 21st century. Prof. Bagley used Robert Putnam’s social capital theory to illustrate social relations in these two British rural areas and how schools did their part to maintain such relations. Finally, Prof. Bagley used ‘complex’, ‘networked’ and ‘evolving’ to summarize the identity in the studied rural spaces in changing times.