Dr. Christopher Ali on Rural Broadband (video)

We were delighted to host Dr. Christopher Ali (Virginia, Media Studies) on Friday, February 25, 2022, at noon CT for a discussion of his important work on rural broadband policy and infrastructure.

This archived page includes video of his talk (linked from the image below and again here) and the original program description.

More information about the whole series here.

bio and current work

Dr. Chrisopher Ali is an Associate Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. His research interests include rural broadband policy, media localism, and local news. He is also a Knight News Innovation Fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columiba University.

Dr. Ali’s current work focuses on rural broadband policy and deployment, and his recent book, Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity (MIT Press, 2021), analyzes how U.S. policy has failed to solve the rural-urban digital divide. The book interrogates current broadband providers and policies, with case studies from the rural Midwest.

According to the publisher, “Ali argues that rural broadband policy is both broken and incomplete: broken because it lacks coordinated federal leadership and incomplete because it fails to recognize the important roles of communities, cooperatives, and local providers in broadband access.” Looking to the historical model of wiring rural America for electricity and telephone, Dr. Ali also proposes a new approach for democratizing rural broadband policy to more effectively meet rural digital needs.

prior and other work

Dr. Ali’s first book, Media Localism: The Policies of Place (University of Illinois Press, 2017), provides a comparative analysis of local media regulations and supports in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, and explores the implications of these regulatory landscapes on the long-term viability of local news provision.

Dr. Ali is also currently working on a research project exploring “why Americans trust PBS more than any other public institution.”