I have been working in rural contexts all of my academic and professional life, first as a village teacher in Northern and Atlantic Canada, and then as a teacher-educator and educational sociologists in a small rural university in eastern Canada (Corbett, 2007, 2009a, 2009b). When I present at conferences however, I am often struck by the way that many rural researchers are not themselves people who live in rural places. I have also come to see that my own work is deeply inflected by my ongoing residence in rural communities. In this paper I will take up key methodological questions and debates initiated by feminist standpoint theory and apply them to the problem of doing social research in rural places. The paper will take the form of a narrative exploration of life and work of an academic whose research, work life and living situation are embedded in a space outside the urban, which I argue is the default space of things educational.