Mara Casey Tieken

Explores how geography—particularly growing up in rural areas—shapes the college experiences and life paths of first-generation students. Highlights the emotional and social costs of leaving home for opportunity, showing how rural students are often forced to choose between staying rooted in their communities or pursuing upward mobility.

Explores how Americans perceive racial demographics in specific locations, comparing rural and urban areas. Finds that participants consistently perceived rural places as having larger White populations and smaller Black populations than urban areas—regardless of the actual demographics.

Makes recommendations to federal, state, and local educational agencies, programs, and other relevant stakeholders to advance STEM education and workforce development for rural America.

Focuses on rural parents without a bachelors degree, investigating the roles they play in their children's aspirations and enrollment at a private, selective liberal arts college and examining their perspectives on this type of school. Results suggest that these parents provide valuable social capital, encourage college aspirations, and view a liberal arts education as a pathway to meaningful and well-paying careers.

Examines school closures in both urban and rural contexts, highlighting how such closures contribute to spatial injustice. Analysis shows that closures are unevenly distributed, disproportionately affecting places where poor communities and communities of color live, and they can bring negative effects, harming students and adults and reducing their access to an important educational and community institution.

Explores the training and development of community-engaged scholars in doctoral programs in education. Highlights the importance of developing specific skills, dispositions, and identities that traditional doctoral programs often overlook, arguing that by fostering collaborative learning and creating a community that embraces project members ’ whole selves, students learn to tell their stories, build “horizontal” research relationships, question their researcher positionalities, and develop identities as community-engaged scholars.

Explores the college-going dilemma faced by rural, first-generation students, who often must choose between staying in their communities or pursuing higher education that may lead them away. Finds that high school guidance counselors, college admissions officials, and the staff of community-based college aspirations organizations adopt a strikingly consistent message: they cite struggling rural economies in their argument for the necessity of a practical degree for all students, one that can be easily leveraged into a career.

Examines how the contemporary community organization Southern Echo draws on and critically engages with the history of the 1950s–60s civil rights movement in its current organizing efforts. Shows that Echo views the civil rights movement as an ongoing struggle and intentionally shapes its structure and strategies in response to the movement’s past.

Highlights the vital role rural schools play in their communities—not just as educational institutions, but as social and economic anchors. Explores how these rural schools influence local racial dynamics and help sustain community life, based on research in two southern towns.