Studies in Urban–Rural Dynamics – serie

Reimagining Rural: Urbanormative Portrayals of Rural Life examines the ways in which rural people and places are being portrayed by popular television, reality television, film, literature, and news media in the United States. It is also an examination of the social processes that reinforce urbanormative standards that normalize urban life and render rural life as something unusual, exotic, or deviant. This includes exploring the role of the media as agenda setting agent, informing people what and how to think about rural life. Further it includes scrutinizing the institution of formal education that promotes a homogenous urban-oriented curriculum, while in the process, marginalizing the unique characteristics of local rural communities. These contributions are some of the only studies of their kind, investigating popular cultural representations of rural life, while providing powerful evidence and unique challenges for an urban society to rethink and reimagine rural life, while confronting the many stereotypes and myths that exist.

Reinventing Rural is a collection of original research papers that examine the ways in which rural people and places are changing in the context of an urbanizing world. This includes exploring the role of the environment, the economy, and related issues such as tourism. While traditionally relying on primary sector work in agriculture, mining, natural resources, and the like, rural areas are finding new ways to sustain themselves. This involves a new emphasis on environmental protection, as one important strategy has been to capitalize on natural amenities to attract residents and tourists. Beyond improvements to the economy are general improvements to the quality-of-life in rural communities. Consistent with this, the volume focuses on the two cornerstones of education and health, considering current challenges and offering ideas for reinventing rural quality-of-life.

Reinventing Rural is a collection of original research papers that examine the ways in which rural people and places are changing in the context of an urbanizing world. This includes exploring the role of the environment, the economy, and related issues such as tourism. While traditionally relying on primary sector work in agriculture, mining, natural resources, and the like, rural areas are finding new ways to sustain themselves. This involves a new emphasis on environmental protection, as one important strategy has been to capitalize on natural amenities to attract residents and tourists. Beyond improvements to the economy are general improvements to the quality-of-life in rural communities. Consistent with this, the volume focuses on the two cornerstones of education and health, considering current challenges and offering ideas for reinventing rural quality-of-life.

The Rural Primitive in American Popular Culture: All Too Familiar studies how the mythology of the primitive rural other became linked to evolutionary theories, both biological and social, that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. This mythology fit well on the imaginary continuums of primitive to civilized, rural to urbanormative, backward to forward-thinking, and regress versus progress. In each chapter of The Rural Primitive, Karen E. Hayden uses popular cultural depictions of the rural primitive to illustrate the ways in which this trope was used to set poor, rural whites apart from others. Not only were they set apart, however; they were also set further down on the imaginary continuum of progress and regress, of evolution and devolution. Hayden argues that small, rural, tight-knit communities, where “everyone knows everyone” and “everyone is related” came to be an allegory for what will happen if society resists modernization and urbanization. The message of the rural, close-knit community is clear: degeneracy, primitivism, savagery, and an overall devolution will result if groups are allowed to become too insular, too close, too familiar.

The Rural Primitive in American Popular Culture: All Too Familiar studies how the mythology of the primitive rural other became linked to evolutionary theories, both biological and social, that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. This mythology fit well on the imaginary continuums of primitive to civilized, rural to urbanormative, backward to forward-thinking, and regress versus progress. In each chapter of The Rural Primitive, Karen E. Hayden uses popular cultural depictions of the rural primitive to illustrate the ways in which this trope was used to set poor, rural whites apart from others. Not only were they set apart, however; they were also set further down on the imaginary continuum of progress and regress, of evolution and devolution. Hayden argues that small, rural, tight-knit communities, where “everyone knows everyone” and “everyone is related” came to be an allegory for what will happen if society resists modernization and urbanization. The message of the rural, close-knit community is clear: degeneracy, primitivism, savagery, and an overall devolution will result if groups are allowed to become too insular, too close, too familiar.

In this interdisciplinary volume, sociolinguists and sociologists explore the intersections of language, culture, and identity for rural populations around the world. Challenging stereotypical views of rural backwardness and urban progress, the contributors reveal how language is a key mechanism for constructing the meaning of places and the people who identify with them. With research that spans numerous countries and several continents, the chapters in this volume add broadly to knowledge about status and prestige, authenticity and belonging, rural-urban relations, and innovation and change among rural peoples and in rural communities across the globe.

This book investigates urbanormativity—a concept that privileges urban normalcy and desirability over rural deviance and undesirability. The “reality” section outlines its foundations—urbanization, urban-rural systems, and urban dependency. The “representation” section explores urbanormative culture by considering cultural capital, media, and identity. The last section, “everyday life,” examines urban-rural disparities in law and politics and in life within different communities. It concludes by calling for a rural justice approach that will revalue the rural.

This book investigates urbanormativity—a concept that privileges urban normalcy and desirability over rural deviance and undesirability. The “reality” section outlines its foundations—urbanization, urban-rural systems, and urban dependency. The “representation” section explores urbanormative culture by considering cultural capital, media, and identity. The last section, “everyday life,” examines urban-rural disparities in law and politics and in life within different communities. It concludes by calling for a rural justice approach that will revalue the rural.

The tremendous loss of groundwater has been a longstanding concern in Kansas, where areas of the High Plains aquifer have plummeted. Groundwater Citizenship: Well Owners, Environmentalism, and the Depletion of the High Plains Aquifer investigates water conservation efforts, environmental priorities, and water supply awareness among private water well owners, a key social group whose water usage is pivotal to safeguarding aquifers. This book discusses how reliance on private and public water supplies influences watering practices by asking if owning a well changes the propensity to conserve water. To explore how water supplies shape environmental actions and beliefs, sociologist Brock Ternes constructed a one-of-a-kind dataset by surveying over 850 well owners and non-well owners throughout Kansas. His analyses reveal that well ownership influences several dimensions of water consumption, and he identifies how Kansans’ notions of environmentalism are recalibrated by their systems of water provision. This book frames well owners as unique conservationists whose water use is shaped by larger structures—aquifers, water laws, and food systems. Groundwater Citizenship takes a sociological look at water systems to facilitate adaptive approaches to sustainable resource management.

In Country Teachers in City Schools, Chea Parton uses conversations with teachers who grew up one place and ended up teaching in another to investigate the influence of place on the personal and professional identity building of teachers and their teaching practice.

Gregory M. Fulkerson offers a complete portrait of what communities are, how they work, and how they are embedded in urban–rural systems at regional, national, and global scales. After explaining the concept of urban–rural systems, Fulkerson walks through the central dynamics of environmental demography, political economy, culture, social interaction, the built environment, and community connections. His focus on urban–rural systems ensures that communities are understood as nodes within a network, overcoming the tendency to view them as self-contained. Each chapter in Community in Urban–Rural Systems: Theory, Planning, and Development offers a blend of classical and contemporary theories and concludes with relevant planning considerations. An additional chapter on community development provides strategies for translating planning considerations into action. The conclusion offers insights into long-term principles of community sustainability and justice.

Gregory M. Fulkerson offers a complete portrait of what communities are, how they work, and how they are embedded in urban–rural systems at regional, national, and global scales. After explaining the concept of urban–rural systems, Fulkerson walks through the central dynamics of environmental demography, political economy, culture, social interaction, the built environment, and community connections. His focus on urban–rural systems ensures that communities are understood as nodes within a network, overcoming the tendency to view them as self-contained. Each chapter in Community in Urban–Rural Systems: Theory, Planning, and Development offers a blend of classical and contemporary theories and concludes with relevant planning considerations. An additional chapter on community development provides strategies for translating planning considerations into action. The conclusion offers insights into long-term principles of community sustainability and justice.

Using case studies and an auto-ethnographic study of rural education history in New York State, Casey Thomas Jakubowski provides an introduction to recent events in state-level educational policy implementation. Rural Education History: State Policy Meets Local Implementation argues that rural communities are subjected to urbanormative policy, especially in their schools, and provides voice to an understudied phenomena in an under researched region. The chapters combine sociology, policy, and rich case studies to demonstrate the realities, and nearby history, in rural America.

In Big Rural: Rural Industrial Places, Democracy, and What Next, Crystal Cook Marshall unveils the rural not as wild and unknowable but as measured and intervened-in as big cities. Drawing international comparisons with a case study centering on the Pocahontas Coalfield, Cook Marshall documents that rural places are often systems among systems that scientists and engineers heavily shape both in landscape and culture. Often single sector economies with consolidated power and automation away of jobs, these rural industrial places compound the problems of their inhabitants, even threatening their capacity to practice democracy. Cook Marshall interacts with rural interveners from industry to Rural Studies and Science and Technology scholars to policy advocates, also detailing the gaps in related scholarship. Building from analysis, she proposes a range of antidotes to the extraction and destruction of “Big Rural” both in material life and in knowledge, such as potential National Rural and Sustainable Agricultural strategies. Through these, in interviews with rural change agents, through research, and through local and federal paths, Cook Marshall asserts a way forward for the rural that is more equitable and just.

This book examines the systemic and structural nature of social inequalities, focusing on how the urban–rural divide intersects with race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality to shape identities and access to opportunities.It offers valuable insights for sociologists and scholars of inequality seeking to broaden the scope of current research. Ultimately, the authors argue that it will be impossible to build a more just and equitable society without addressing the urban–rural nexus.

This book examines the history of conflict in education through the lens of specific case studies from schools in rural areas of New York.Education has historically been a major source of conflict among citizens, voters, and residents in the United States. From the colonists in New England’s efforts to educate their children in the late 1800s, to the debates over mask mandates at schools emerging from Covid-19, the dissonance between pro-local democracy national narratives and the active suppression of community rights exists in every state. Contemporary conflicts in education and politics include the question of what and how to teach history, with some politically motivated groups demonizing critical race theory, inclusive civics, and history education. Utilizing local and state archives, newspapers, and eyewitness accounts, and challenging the consensus narrative that privileged the elite’s viewpoints, this book expands research on the history of educational reform post-World War II outside of the urban focus predominant in the field and challenges the traditional rural deficit narrative.

Urban Dependency investigates the risks of urban populations that cannot survive without the massive consumption of basic rural products like food, textiles, fossil fuels, and other energy-rich goods that are harvested by a shrinking rural base. Thomas and Fulkerson argue that though essential, rural workers and communities are poorly compensated for their labor that is both dangerous and highly exploitative. While the rural population is already shrinking, the authors predict that harsh political-economic conditions will only fuel further rural-urban migration, worsening the problem of urban dependency. The authors apply their theory of the energy economy to explore a balance between the supply and demand of energy resources that promotes rural justice.

City and Country: The Historical Evolution of Urban-Rural Systems begins with a simple assumption: every human requires, on average, two-thousand calories per day to stay alive. Tracing the ramifications of this insight leads to the caloric well: the caloric demand at one point in the environment. As population increases, the depth of the caloric well reflects this increased demand and requires a population to go further afield for resources, a condition called urban dependency. City and Country traces the structural ramifications of these dynamics as the population increased from the Paleolithic to today. We can understand urban dependency as the product of the caloric demands a population puts on a given environment, and when those demands outstrip the carry capacity of the environment, a caloric well develops that forces a community to look beyond its immediate area for resources. As the well deepens, the horizon from which resources are gathered is pushed further afield, often resulting in conflict with neighboring groups. Prior to settled villages, increases in population resulted in cultural (technological) innovations that allowed for greater use of existing resources: the broad-spectrum revolution circa 20 thousand years ago, the birth of agricultural villages 11 thousand years ago, and hierarchically organized systems of multiple settlements working together to produce enough food during the Ubaid period in Mesopotamia seven-thousand years ago—the first urban-rural systems. As cities developed, increasing population resulted in an ever-deepening morass of urban dependency that required expansion of urban-rural systems. These urban-rural dynamics today serve as an underlying logic upon which modern capitalism is built. The culmination of two decades of research into the nature of urban-rural dynamics, City and Country argues that at the heart of the logic of capitalism is an even deeper logic: urbanization is based on urban dependency.