Ashley Smedley

About Ashley Smedley

Posts by Ashley Smedley:

December 10 2025

RSS Member and Law Professor Jessica A. Shoemaker Wins American Agricultural Law Association Award

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.

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November 26 2025

RSS Members Included as Authors in Book Titled “Global Reflections on Positionality in Rural Access to Justice Research”

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.”

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November 21 2025

Three RSS Members Quoted in Newsweek on the Future of Rural America

RSS members Shannon Monnat (Syracuse University), Ken Johnson (University of New Hampshire), and Lisa Pruitt (UC Davis) provided comment for a recent Newsweek article on the American Communities Project (ACP) called “Rural America Feels Differently About The Future.” The ACP survey’s goal is to “understand the different worlds that people in the United States call their homes.” As the article notes, there is not one rural America, but instead several groups within the demographic, each of which faces differing challenges and has differing views—something the survey shows. Rural communities are not universally conservative or progressive and have a variety of concerns and priorities. Quotes from Monnat, Johnson, and Pruitt leverage their expertise in studying rural communities to augment the description of the survey results.

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November 21 2025

RSS Member Catharine Biddle (University of Maine) Quoted in New York Times Piece on Rural Youth

A recent New York Times opinion piece title “How Rural Kids Got Left Behind” quoted Dr. Catharine Biddle from the University of Maine, who researches rural education. Biddle provided comments on the importance of wraparound services, which provide students with necessities like food and health care in the form of school nurses and counselors on site. She noted that while these services are vital, they are costly and rural areas are already facing issues like teacher shortages. Her article from the Rural Educator, “‘We’ll probably all be in trouble for hugging a kid’: Rural teacher radicalism in addressing adverse childhood experiences,” in which Biddle interviewed over 100 educators in rural Maine, was also cited in the opinion piece.

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November 21 2025

Matt Brooks (Florida State) quoted in NPR piece on immigration trends

Rural Sociological Society member Dr. Matt Brooks was recently quoted in a National Public Radio piece titled “’We need to get out of here’: Trump’s immigration crackdown is quietly reshaping where immigrants live in America.” Brooks is a demographer and assistant professor at Florida State University. He spoke about population flows and migration trends, highlighting how many immigrants initially settle in big cities but then move on to seek jobs in agriculture or manufacturing in the South or the Midwest. Now, several are moving a third time, of in response to immigration crackdowns.

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November 12 2025

RSS Past-President John Green Wins Rural Renewal Research Prize

Past-President John Green Wins Rural Renewal Research Prize

The Rural Renewal Research Prize is an award given to a global leader in rural renewal research, education, and engagement by the Oklahoma State University Rural Renewal Initiative. The prize honors individuals who have made significant contributions to the renewal of rural communities and is awarded at the annual Rural Renewal Symposium, which was held in Woodward, Oklahoma, in November 2025. RSS Past-Presidnet, John Green’s nomination letter noted:

“John’s work has real impact. Community engagement and listening to and understanding all stakeholders is foundational to John’s scholarship. This abiding perspective aligns with John’s worldview of the importance of building and enhancing rural capacity. He is the kind of public scholar that we critically need at the forefront of challenges and opportunities facing rural places today.”

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November 7 2025

RSS Member Mara Casey Tieken Warns Against Temptation of Rural School Closure in Washington Monthly

This op-ed explains that school closures are on the rise, in rural and urban communities alike, and that they rarely save money and can hurt students and communities, especially Black communities. It argues for a slower, fairer approach to closure.

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November 5 2025

Former RSS President Jennifer Sherman Quoted in NYT Story about SNAP

New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall referenced the work of former RSS President, Jennifer Sherman of Washington State University, in his recent coverage of the Trump administration’s failure to fund SNAP benefits, formerly known as food stamps.

Sherman describes “the agonized struggle of the rural poor who, when faced with a major economic setback, are forced to turn to government for help: When they themselves need to use such benefit, they experience a deep sense of stigma and shame. They drove to stores far away to use SNAP benefits, hoping to avoid the gaze of their neighbors and community members.”

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October 29 2025

Former RSS President Carolyn Sachs Co-edits Volume on Women and Smallholder Farming

Book title: Women and smallholder farming: Addressing global inequities in agriculture
Edited by: RSS Member Professor Emerita Carolyn Sachs, Pennsylvania State University, USA and Dr Paige Castellanos, Oxfam America (OUS), USA

There are an estimated 500 million smallholder farmers across the world, of which a considerable percentage are women. Despite their large numbers and important roles, women smallholders remain largely unsupported and their contribution to agriculture is often devalued because of their sex.

Women and smallholder farming: Addressing global inequities in agriculture provides a comprehensive overview of the main obstacles and challenges women smallholders continue to face, such as restricted access to markets and education, as well as a lack of control over assets and property rights.

The book also assesses the impact of sociocultural factors on women smallholder farmers in different regions around the world, including Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. In highlighting these issues, the book considers how key stakeholders across the agri-food supply chain can support, empower and sufficiently compensate women smallholder farmers for their contribution to agriculture.

*Special Offer*
Enter code WOMEN20 at checkout via www.bdspublishing.com to redeem 20% of your purchase of the book. Discount code expires 31st December 2025.

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October 28 2025

“Your neighbors are new every week”: short-term rentals, housing, and community wellbeing in high-amenity rural places

“Your neighbors are new every week” Short-term rentals, housing, and community wellbeing in high-amenity rural places

Amenity driven in-migration, seasonal home ownership, and tourism are long standing processes impacting housing affordability and community wellbeing in high natural amenity rural communities. Short-term rental (STR) accommodations, such as Airbnb and Vacation Rentals By Owner (VRBO), are a relatively new phenomenon that can further limit housing options for full-time residents and members of the seasonal workforce. There is tremendous variation across communities in their efforts to regulate STRs. To assess the impacts of STRs on housing affordability and community wellbeing in a high-amenity rural place, RSS members Alex Theophilus and Jessica Ulrich-Schad analyze and discuss interviews with 28 residents of the Bear Lake area in northeastern Utah and southeastern Idaho. Most communities around Bear Lake had enacted minimal to no regulations on STRs at the time of this research, making this a suitable case study for the impacts of STRs when no restrictions are placed on them. Community members expressed concern that STRs are driving high housing costs while also negatively impacting community interactions and providing little to no benefit to the local economy. To illuminate avenues for better STR regulation, we discuss alternative examples of how STRs can be regulated in high-amenity rural communities. We conclude with a discussion of the future implications of STR policy, particularly as it relates to housing affordability and socioeconomic inequality.

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