Roundup: October 18, 2022
A regular feature of our growing online journal, The Rural Review, these roundup posts collect notable recent research, analysis, and related rural news and commentary. Feel free to send suggestions for future collections to us here. And, more details on other contribution opportunities in The Rural Review can be found here.
Recent Publications
In The Future of Rural Lawyering: How Law Schools Should Embrace a General Practice Legal Clinic Model to Address the Current and Future Legal Needs of Rural and Smaller Communities, author Melissa L. Kidder (Director of Legal Clinics & Assistant Professor, Ohio Northern College of Law) discusses how law schools might help with the rural lawyer crisis by using their in-house legal clinic programs to promote and encourage law students to go into rural and smaller communities.
In “It’s a lonely old world”: Developing a Multidimensional Understanding of Loneliness in Farming, authors Rebecca Wheeler and Matt Lobley (both of the Centre for Rural Policy Research, University of Exeter) and Jude McCann and Alex Plillimore (both of the Farming Community Network, Northhampton, UK) develop a multidimensional understanding of loneliness in farming communities, based on qualitative research with the UK farming community. The authors suggest that understanding the complexities and nuances of loneliness within farming is important in order to mitigate the issue and help address wider mental health problems within the population.
“It’s Not Hate but…”: Marginal Categories in Rural Journalism by Gregory Perreault (Communication, Appalachian State), Ruth Moon (Mass Communication, Louisiana State), Jessica Fargen Walsh (Journalism & Mass Communications, Nebraska), and Mildred Perreault (Media & Communication, East Tennessee State) discusses how rural journalists articulate a clear definition for hate speech but struggle to apply that definition to events within their communities, even as they articulate numerous forms of hate.
In School Closures and Rural Population Decline, author Joseph Sageman (Sociology, Princeton) examines how school closures impact the future growth (or decline) of rural communities by using records from the Common Core of Data (CCD) and U.S. Census. His findings suggest that policymakers often overlook potentially important unintended consequences of school consolidation in rural communities.
A Sociology of Empathy and Shared Understandings: Contextualizing Beliefs and Attitudes on Why People Use Opioids by Jerel M. Ezell (Center for Cultural Humility, Cornell), Brooke Olson, Suzan M. Walters (Global Public Health, NYU), Samuel R. Friedman (Population Health, NYU Medicine), Lawrence Ouellet (Public Health, Illinois), and Mai T. Pho (Infectious Diseases & Global Health, Chicago Medicine) uses statistics from rural southern Illinois to illuminate the challenges to advancing nuanced, culturally humble programming to advance public health goals related to the opioid epidemic.
In Political Macroenvironments & Cultural Information Protection: The Challenge of Communication in Native American Environmental and Natural Resource Management, author Ryan N. Comfort (The Media School, Indiana) presents results from a survey of natural resource managers and other environmental professionals working for Native American Nations in the United States that show the complex political macroenvironment within which communicators must carefully operate.
The Stories We Tell: Colorblind Racism, Classblindness, and Narrative Framing in the Rural Midwest by Teresa Irene Gonzales (Sociology, Loyola Chicago), Elizabeth M. Thissel (Sociology, Massachusetts), and Soumitra Thorat (Public Services Management & Organization, King’s College London) draws on ethnographic research in the rural Midwest to provide a case study demonstrating how narratives perpetuated by both decisionmakers and residents, across racial and class backgrounds, are rooted in colorblind racism and classblindness regarding African Americans, Mexican Americans, and poor whites.
In The Influence of Evangelical and Political Identity on Climate Change Views, authors Benjamin S. Lowe (Natural Resources & Environment, Florida), Glenn D. Israel (Agricultural Education & Communication, Florida), Ramesh Paudyal (Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission), and Kenneth E. Wallen (Natural Resources, Idaho) examines the relationships between evangelical identity, religiosity, partisan affiliation, and measures of climate-related views to demonstrate the nuanced relationships between these variables and the implications they have on the public’s climate change views.
News & Commentary
Rural hospitals are being sold to investors on the cheap. Read more about how some companies are trying to revive these badly run-down and outdated hospitals in this NPR article by Blake Farmer. The phenomenon of rural hospitals’ struggle is not new and the Assistance for Rural Community Hospitals (ARCH) Act, which is supported by the American Hospital Association (AHA), is one measure some advocates are pursuing to try to help. Problems that have led to more than 130 rural hospital closures in the last 10 years can be found in this report.
According to a recent press release, the Inflation Reduction Act included $121 million for the Agriculture Department to fight climate change in rural America. Rural Development will use $111 million of that to fund at least 289 projects in socially vulnerable communities in almost every state. Rural Development has a list of every project.
This article discusses Walmart’s efforts to get into the meatpacking business. Walmart now has a minority stake and board representation in Sustainable Beef LLC – a $325 million planned beef packing plant in North Platte, Nebraska. Despite being a major U.S. business itself, this is an effort by Walmart to break up the “Big Four” meatpackers’ (Cargill, JBS, Marfrig, and Tyson) power in the meatpacking industry.
USA Today’s Nada Hassanein has published a four-part series on disparities in health care among rural mothers. See Part One (an overview of the issue), Part Two (inequalities among rural indigenous people), Part Three (maternal mortality among rural women of color), and Part Four (historical roots of the phenomenon). Sarah Melotte illustrates in The Daily Yonder the danger of rural pregnancy and childbirth through stories from Nebraska, Montana, and Texas.