A periodic collection of recent research, analysis, and other notable rural items.

A reading list of rural-related creative nonfiction curated by the Rural Reconciliation Project. This collection focuses on rural homecomings and the revisiting of rural homeplaces.

Event announcement. Join Dana Fritz, Hixson-Lied Professor of Art, Art History and Design, for an important reflection on how humans make, shape, and understand landscapes. Like a virtual fieldtrip to the Nebraska Sandhills, but through the lens of the most thoughtful and introspective of guides, visual artist Fritz will discuss and share photographs from her new book, “Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape.” The book examines, in provocative ways, the unique hand-planted forest of the Bessey Ranger District and now includes some of the last images captured before the 2022 wildfires near Halsey. Event on February 21, 2024, at 4pm at the University of Nebraska College of Law.

In Rural Community and Career Connected Learning: Impacts of High School Internships Prioritizing People and Place, Allison L. Ricket (SROI and Impact Measurement, Ohio University), Jacqueline Yahn (College of Education, Ohio University), and Emily Bentley (Education Engagement Specialist, Building Bridges to Careers) examines the outcomes of non-school internships hosted by two Appalachian Ohio organizations: Rural Action and Building Bridges to Careers. This qualitative study, guided by the conceptual framework of community and career connected learning, seeks to fill a gap in the literature where existing studies favor a distinctly urban-centric vantage point or focus on optimizing social mobility and developing skills needed to maintain a globalized, unrooted workforce.

A periodic collection of recent research, analysis, and other notable rural items. This roundup features recent scholarship by @lkeenereck and others, rural-related news, updates of recent events, and a podcast episode to consider.

In The Achilles heel of the U.S. food industries: Exposure to labor and upstream industries in the supply chain, authors Ahmad Zia Wahdat and Jayson L. Lusk (both of the Department of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University) analyze the impact labor issues can have on downstream industries.

In A Guide to the American Community Survey (ACS) for the Rural Researcher: Unpacking the Conceptual and Technical Aspects of Using Secondary Data for Rural Research, author Kristie LeBeau demonstrates and identifies how authors can use the ACS to conduct rural research.

Law and Rurality Workshop Schedule for Fall 2023

In The Rural Housing Crisis: Analytical Dimensions and Emblematic Issues, Stefan Kordel (Geography, Friedrich Alexander University, Germany) and Matthias Naumann (Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development, Germany) argue that while much attention has been paid to the housing crisis in urban regions, the crisis of sustainable housing availability in rural settings is both relevant to wider debates in housing studies and crucial for successful political action to address the need for just and inclusive housing.