Upcoming book on rural politics includes contributions from Lisa Pruitt, Mara Casey Tieken, and Sarah Walton
Upcoming book on rural politics includes contributions from Lisa Pruitt, Mara Casey Tieken, and Sarah Walton
Lisa Pruitt (University of California, Davis), Mara Casey Tieken (Bates College), and Sarah Walton (University of Maine) all contributed chapters to an upcoming edited volume from De Gruyter titled “Rethinking Rural Politics Place-Based Identity, Political Ideology, and Policy in Rural America.” Edited by Nicholas Jacobs, the book brings together a collection of leading experts in rural studies to offer a comprehensive framework for understanding rural America and expand the scope of existing research. Jacobs will be a plenary speaker at the 2026 RSS meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Rural Sociological Society member Dr. Florence Becot was recently quoted in a National Public Radio piece titled “Farmers are about to pay a lot more for health insurance.” Becot is a rural sociologist and associate professor in agricultural health and safety at the Pennsylvania State University. She spoke on how essential it is that farmers have adequate insurance; NPR specifically cited a 2022 study in which she found that more than 20% of U.S. farmers had medical debt exceeding $1,000, and more than half were not confident they could cover the costs of a major illness or injury. As Becot notes, farmers are incredibly vulnerable, especially as ongoing changes in tariffs and subsidies impact their ability to make a profit.
Shannon Monnat (Syracuse University) and Tim Slack (Louisiana State University) recently published an article in The Conversation titled “6 myths about rural America: How conventional wisdom gets it wrong.” Monnat and Slack are both rural demographers who study the causes and consequences of well-being in rural America who also recently published a book together titled “Rural and Small-Town America: Context, Composition, and Complexities.” Their article discusses myths related to depopulation, farming, race, health, “traditional family,” and the political idea of “rural revolt.” Their article is an eye-opening and accessible window into the realities that rural communities face.
Kautstubh Kumar and Douglas Jackson-Smith, both from the Ohio State University, along with their colleague Jeffrey M. Bielicki, recently published an article in the journal “Environmental Science & Policy.” The article, titled “Evaluating credibility, legitimacy, and salience in a participatory modeling project in the food, energy, water nexus,” assessed participatory modeling in the context of the credibility, legitimacy, and salience framework. This work helps societal actors and stakeholders make project decisions for development and ensure that goals of these different parties align when planning and executing these projects.
RSS member Hannah Haksgaard, a Professor at University of South Dakota Knudson School of Law, was recently award the Professional Scholarship Award (book) by the American Agricultural Law Association. Her book “The Rural Lawyer: How To Incentivize Rural Law Practice and Help Small Communities Thrive” was published in 2025 by Cambridge University Press. Focusing on South Dakota’s pioneering Rural Attorney Recruitment Program, this book demonstrates how targeted legislative interventions can help small communities thrive.
RSS member Jessica A. Shoemaker, the Steinhart Foundation Distinguished Professor of Law at University of Nebraska College of Law, was recently award the Professional Scholarship Award (article) by the American Agricultural Law Association, along with her co-author James Fallows Tierney from the Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Their article “Trading Acres” is forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal and discusses rural land grabs and important potential reforms.
Hannah Haksgaard (University of South Dakota), Elizabeth Chambliss (University of South Carolina), and Joseph Donnermeyer (Ohio State University) were included as chapter authors in a recent book from Bloomsbury Collections titled “Global Reflections on Positionality in Rural Access to Justice Research.” The book, edited by Michele Statz and Daniel Newman, offers a unique look at rural access to justice through a series of personal and professional reflections by leading scholars in the field. Haksgaard’s chapter is called “ My Past is My Present: Teaching in and Writing about a Home Community,” while Chambliss’s is titled “ Claiming the South” and Donnermeyer’s is “ Considerations of Access to Justice in the Context of Disaster.”
