Roundup: August 23, 2021
Recent Publications
A new piece in Rural Sociology by Maraki Kebede (independent), Annie Maselli (Education Policy Studies, Penn State), Kendra Taylor (independent), and Erica Frankenberg (Education Policy Studies, Penn State) addresses diversity and segregation in rural school districts. In Ethnoracial Diversity and Segregation in U.S. Rural School Districts, the authors determine that “rising Hispanic enrollment is a central element of changing rural public school student demographics nationwide” but that, despite this increasing diversity, “segregation within rural districts persists.”
Elspeth Iralu (New Mexico, Architecture and Planning) published Putting Indian Country on the Map: Indigenous Practices of Spatial Justice in Antipode. This super interesting article relates to ongoing conversations about the ways maps have traditionally been used to dispossess Indigenous people and examines a “visual archive of Indigneous mapping practices” to “re-centre practices of counter-mapping around Indigenous spatial justice.”
Kelly M. Cobourn (Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation, Virginia Tech), Xinda Ji,Siân Mooney (School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University), and Neil F. Crescenti (The Nature Conservancy) published The Effect of Prior Appropriation Water Rights on Land-allocation Decisions in Irrigated Agriculture in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.
James Chapin and Jesse Abrams (both of Forestry and Natural Resources, University of Georgia), Thomas J. Timberlake (Western Wildland Environmental Threat Assessment Center, USDA Forest Service), Alexander M. Evans (Forest Stewards Guild), and Courtney Schultz and María Fernández-Giménez (both of Forest and Rangeland Stewardship, Colorado State University) published Operationalizing Resilience on U.S. National Forestlands: A Quantitative Analysis of Environmental Impact Statements in Society & Natural Resources.
Tracy McDaniel and Francisco Soto Mas (both of Population Health, University of New Mexico) and Andrew L. Sussman (Family and Community Medicine, University of New Mexico School of Medicine) published Growing Connections: Local Food Systems and Community Resilience in Society & Natural Resources.
News & Commentary
David Fontana (George Washington University Law) published a piece on the spatial concentration of political power entitled America’s Hidden Crisis of Power and Place in The Washington Post Magazine.
Olivia Weeks wrote a piece on SNAP benefits in rural areas on The Daily Yonder.
Naomi Ishisaka published The Heat Is Rising and So Is The Danger to Farmworkers. We Can Do Something About It in The Seattle Times.
Katherine Blunt published Renewables Are Fast Replacing Coal, Except in Rural America in the Wall Street Journal.
Chris Clayton has a piece in Progressive Farmer discussing the rural projects included in the pending Senate infrastructure bill.
Farmerama Radio recently uploaded the final episode of a four-part series called Landed, which discusses the role of the family farm in the future of agriculture, rural landscapes, and sustainability more generally. All of the episodes explore pre- and post-colonial land relations across Scotland.
Nina Lakhani published ‘They Rake in Profits- Everyone Else Suffers’: US Workers Lose Out as Big Chicken Gets Bigger in The Guardian.
Events & Recordings
The Journal of Peasent Studies is seeking contributions to a new Forum on “climate change and critical agrarian studies.” Saturnino M. Borras Jr. (Agrarian Studies, International Institute of Social Studies of Arasmus University Rotterdam), Ian Scoones (Development Studies, University of Sussex), Amita Baviskar (Environmental Studies and Sociology-Anthropology, Ashoka University), Marc Edelman (Anthropology, City University of New York), Nancy Lee Peluso (Environmental Science, Policy and Management, Berkeley), and Wendy Wolford (Global Development, Cornell ) have published an essay, Climate Change and Agrarian Struggles: An Invitation to Contribute to a JPS Forum, about the project and opportunity.
The Aspen Institute hosted an event entitled Investing in Infrastructure: Rural Strategies for Building and Maintaining Healthy Local Economics on August 16th. More information and program materials posted here.
The U.S. Census Bureau held a news conference on August 12th to discuss the release of the 2020 Census redistricting data. A recording of this news conference can be found here. This graphic from the Census Bureau also illustrates the percent change in county population from 2010 to 2020, with a clear loss of population in many parts of rural America.
Additional Resources
Andrew Ruis (Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin) recently announced a new (and free!) online land-use planning simulator called iPlan. This tool allows users to model the impact of land use on social, economic, and environmental indicators anywhere in the contiguous U.S.—including, of course, rural America. iPlan is available here and the Twitter thread summarizing the work, and its development, is available here.