Roundup: August 19, 2022

News & Commentary

  • A new Iowa State University project aims to help address the state’s rural housing shortage with a novel approach: 3D- printed houses. The Iowa State College of Design’s 3D Affordable Innovative Technologies Housing Project has received a $1.4 million grant from the Iowa Economic Development Authority for the initiative and the project will be fully funded at $2.14 million. Read more about this project here.

  • Clair Suddath published an article in Bloomberg titled “A Very Dangerous Place to be Pregnant is Getting Even Scarier” discussing U.S. maternity ward closures in rural areas. You can also listen to a discussion of the article and Suddath’s experiences here. Finally, read Lisa Pruitt’s commentary with the Legal Ruralism blog here.

  • Rick Rojas, Christopher Flavelle, and Campbell Robertson authored a New York Times Article, “How Coal Mining and Years of Neglect Left Kentucky Towns at the Mercy of Flooding,” discussing the institutional decisions of the U.S. helped exacerbate the effects of the record-breaking flooding in Appalachia. However, experts say this is just the beginning of the floods to be seen in the area – read more in this Inside Climate News article.

  • Olivia Paschal’s (The American Prospect) article, The Modern-Day Company Towns of Northwest Arkansas, makes the case companies that Walmart and Tyson Foods are exacerbating how inequalities play out across the rural-urban divide. The Legal Ruralism blog has also highlighted a few excerpts from the article here.

  • Ben Abrams discusses the effect of inflation on rural communities in this NPR article. Further, Abrams highlights Iowa State University’s Small Town Project which published the recent article, Impact of Inflation on Rural Household Expenses in the U.S., June 2020 – 2022.  

  • This NPR article by Dan Gunderson, “A Self-Serve Grocery Store Helps Feed a Small Minnesota Town,” highlights efforts of a rural community’s efforts to provide quality groceries and necessities. This article sheds light on the larger phenomena of rural grocery store closures, which is discussed further in this The Rural Blog article.

  • Read more on African American land ownership in this Daily Yonder article by Sarah Melotte discussing how developers and others have used the heirs’ property ownership to force the sale of family-owned land for decades. Additionally, read this New Republic article discussing how the U.S. government incentivized these efforts and personal stories of those affected. Efforts to combat these experiences are being made by programs such as the Sustainable Forestry and African American Land Retention Network, read more about them here.

  • The New York Times published “In Rural America, Covid Hits Black and Hispanic People Hardest,” which explores how the Omicron wave has had devastating effects on rural racial and ethnic mortality rates.

Recent Publications

  • Dinko Hanaan Dinko and Hanson Nyantakyi-Frimpong (both of the Department of Geography & Environment, University of Denver) recently published A Drone Photo-Elicitation Approach to Researching Legal Pluralism in Natural Resource Access which discusses how drone photography can help with spatializing and visualizing legal relations involving natural resources across space and time.

  • In A Place Meaning Scale for Rural Communities Undergoing Landscape Change, authors Nicole M. Evans (Natural Reserve System, University of California – Santa Barbara), William P. Stewart (Recreation, Sport, and Tourism, University of Illinois Urbana – Champaign), and Carena van Riper (Natural Resources & Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana – Champaign) discuss their research concerning peoples’ characterizations of why residents connect with certain places to help direct attention within the place scholarship to the study of rural communities.

  • Michael Carolan (Sociology, Colorado State) recently published Digital Agriculture Killjoy: Happy Objects and Cruel Quests for the Good Life. This article focuses on the not-often connected phenomena of agriculture, conceptions of the good life, and pursuits of happiness as rural studies canons.

  • In The Impact of No-Till on Agricultural Land Values in the United States Midwest, authors LeChen (Agricultural & Resource Economics, North Carolina State), Roderick M. Rejesus (Agricultural & Resource Economics, North Carolina State), Sekan Aglasan (Mehmet Akif Ersoy University), Stephen Hagen (Regrow Ag), and William Salas (Regrow Ag) investigate the impact of no-till agricultural practices through county-level data to help better understand the economic and environmental impacts and values of modern-day farms.

  • In The Virtual Good Farmer: Farmers’ Use of Social Media and the (Re)presentation of “Good Farming”, authors Mark Riley (Geography & Planning, University of Liverpool) and Bethany Robertson (Sociology & Social Policy, University of Leeds) discuss how the role of social media may play in the presentation, refinement, and reworking of notions of good farming.

  • Lingxi Chenyang (Environmental Law Fellow, Indiana Law), Andrew Currie (MF Candidate, Yale), Hannah Darrin (MEM, Yale), and Nathan Rosenberg (Visiting Scholar, Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic) have published Farming with Trees: Reforming U.S. Farm Policy to Expand Agroforestry and Mitigate Climate Change. This article discusses the potential of agroforestry systems to mitigate climate change and explores how federal programs for agricultural loans, subsidies, research, and education miss agroforestry opportunities.  

  • Ahmad Zia Wahdat and Jayson L. Lusk (both of the Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University) recently published The Achilles Heel of the U.S. Food Industries to help measure and identify the U.S. food manufacturing industries’ vulnerability to upstream industries and labor occupations.

Events & Recordings

  • The Center for Great Plains Studies will be hosting a special education-focused conference on September 15, 2022, as part of their year-long programming them of Reckoning & Reconciliation in the Great Plains. Read more about the series in general here. Learn more about this one-day free conference open to all here. Registration is required, so register here.

  • The National Summit on Journalism in Rural America was hosted by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues and the College of Communication and Information at the University of Kentucky in early June 2022. The impact of rural journalism has been highlighted in other Project roundups, and you can officially view the Summit’s sessions on YouTube here.

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