Media Rurality

Patrick Brodie is Assistant Professor in the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin.Darin Barney is Professor of Communication Studies at McGill University.

“This remarkably original collection offers a much needed intervention, centering the role of rural spaces to media and infrastructure. The way the contributors engage with issues of uneven connections and energy transitions, and with rural entanglements within global supply chains and planetary mines, is superb.”—Rahul Mukherjee, author of Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty“A rural of omnidirectional connectivity; sites of roiling metabolisms of extraction, resistance, and media intensiveness; a rurality of emergence and theoretical complexity. This volume expands the boundaries of rural spaces, lives, and politics as media ruralities that are peopled and place-based, enduring and vital, and essential for research addressing contemporary debates in global media studies.”—Rafico Ruiz, author of Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier

• Media Rurality / Patrick Brodie and Darin Barney 1Part I. Extractive Mediations1. Green Data Capitalism and Its Rural Extractions / Megan Wiessner, Anne Pasek, Nicole Starosielski, and Hunter Vaughan 412. Scenes of Extraction: Mediating Rurality, Wilderness, and Hinterland in Dutch and Chinese Film / Emily Ng and Esther Peeren 653. Imperial Wireless: Energetic Mediation at Marconi’s Connemara Station / Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie 884. Mediated Extraction: The Production of Dark Ruralities in the Atlantic World / Assatu Wisseh 113Part II. Practicing Rurality5. Mediating the Periphery: Metabolism and Technicity on the Outskirts of Istanbul / Burç Köstem 1336. Domestic Solar Media in Rural Tanzania: Toward an Energy-Media Matrix / Lisa Parks 1577. Hong Kong in Siliguri/Dhulabari: Exploring Media Objects and Border Towns / Ishita Tiwary 1798. The Preservation of Embodied Masculinity in Rural Tech-Altered Workplaces / Jenna Burrell 200Part III. Political Ruralities9. Gas Can Imaginaries: On the Politics of Combustion, Anti-Urban Resentment, and Playing Indian at the 2022 Freedom Convoy / Jordan B. Kinder 22710. Where the Market Dares Not Tread: Mapping Rural Broadband in the United States / Christopher Ali 25211. The Virtual Fire / Cindy Kaiying Lin 27712. Embankment Economies, Soaking Ecologies, and the Conservation Zone of Kaziranga / Ayesha Vemuri 296Acknowledgments 323Contributors 329Index 333