Dr. Kai A. Schafft
Dr. Kai A. Schafft
Professor of Education (EDLDR & Rural Soc)
Email:[email protected]
Phone: 814-863-2031
302F Rackley Building
University Park, PA 16802
Department(s)
- Education Policy Studies
Program(s)
- Educational Leadership Program
- Comparative and International Education
Center(s)
- Center on Rural Education and Communities (CREC)
Biography
Kai Schafft is a Professor of Education and Rural Sociology at Penn State University. Dr. Schafft directs the College's Center for Rural Education and Communities and serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Research in Rural Education. Trained as a rural sociologist, with his Ph.D. in Development Sociology from Cornell University, his research broadly examines the relationship between social inequality, spatial inequality, and rural development. Dr. Schafft has also conducted research on rural poverty, student transiency, the determinants of rural childhood obesity, youth aspirations, and rural brain drain, and the role of schools in rural community development. More recent work has examined the school and community impacts of unconventional gas development within Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale play, as well as education and the contexts for youth development within post-socialist contexts. During the spring of 2015, Dr. Schafft was a visiting fellow at Central European University's Institute for Advanced Studies in Budapest, Hungary, where he conducted research on the social and political implications of Hungary's nationality self-government system for Hungary’s Roma minority. He served as President of the Rural Sociological Society (2019-21) and in 2023-24 was a Fulbright Fellow at the Transilvania University of Brasov in Romania where he researched educational policy and the social inclusion/exclusion of Roma youth.
Media
Books:
- Schafft, K.A., Stanić, S., Horvatek, R., & Maselli, A. (Eds.) (2021). Rural youth at the crossroads: Transitional societies in Central Europe and beyond. New York: Routledge.
- Brown, D. L., & Schafft, K. A. (2019). Rural people and communities in the twenty-first century: Resilience and transformation (revised and updated second edition). Cambridge: Polity Press.
- Schafft, K.A., & Jackson, A. (Eds.), (2010). Rural education for the twenty-first century: Identity, place, and community in a globalizing world. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press (Rural Studies Series).
- Narayan, D., Patel, P., Schafft, K., Rademacher, A., & Koch-Schulte, S. (2000). Voices of the poor: Can anyone hear us? New York: Oxford.