Education in rural communities is an interesting site for an analysis of the relationship between place and the cultural politics of schooling. In particular the movements of people, ideas and practices to and from, and also within, rural places suggest the need for theorizing on rural education to consider the relevance of new mobility sociologies and displacement theories. Edward Said's place theories provide an important political sensibility for retheorizing the relationship between the geographies, mobilities, and subjectivities that comprise rural schooling. Drawing on Said's analyses of displacement, discomfort, and pleasure as constitutive of social practices and his elaboration of exilic identities as paradoxical, it is possible to reframe rural education dynamics, particularly teacher mobilities, in new ways; not as natural aspects of globalization, but as linked to the cultural politics of schooling in the contemporary era.