In “Financial Incentives and Landowner Interest in Reforesting Open Lands in the Southeastern United States,” authors Chloe Schnieder and Nina Randazzo (Environmental Defense Fund), Ram Kumar Adhikari (Forestry, Mississippi State University), and Neelam Chandra Poudyal (Natural Resources, University of Tennessee) examine the factors influencing landowners’ willingness to participate in reforestation programs.

In “It’s on All the Time in Our House:” Police Scanners and Everyday Rural Life, author Michael Branch (Sociology, Hartwick College) explores the long-time use of police scanners by laypeople in a rural town in upstate New York. He argues that, despite the perceived community benefits, there are also unforeseen consequences for those living in the community.

For too long, the story of rural America has seemed inevitable: mines closed; farming became unprofitable; rural post offices and train stations shuttered. When read in the passive voice, the declines of rural places and their people just…happened. But considering that the overwhelming majority of the American landscape is rural, how has so much of the country come to be thus marginalized? And if we care about rural communities—and about the cities and suburbs that ostensibly rely on their resources, no matter how invisible that relationship may be today—how can we work towards revitalization?

Over eight chapters, legal scholar and practitioner Ann M. Eisenberg summarizes and systematically dismantles the passive voice at the core of myths about rural decline, dependency, and potential renewal.

In “Intersection of Race and Rurality with Health Care-Associated Infections and Subsequent Outcomes,” authors Katelin B. Nickel, MPH, Hannah Kinzer, MPH, Anne Butler, PhD, MS, Kren E. Joynt Maddox, MD, MPH, Victoria J. Fraser, MD, Jason P. Burnham, MD, MSCI, Jennie H. Kwon, DO, MSCI (all Washington University) examine how social and geographic factors such as race and rurality affect access to equitable healthcare.

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

In Towards a right to the rural?, Levi Van Sant (Integrative Studies, George Mason University) and Madeleine Fairbairn (Environmental Studies, University of California – Santa Cruz) explore the conceptual framework of ‘a right to the rural’ to clarify struggles to access rural spaces.

Book Talk Event - The Rural Lawyer - Prsented by Professor Hannah Haksgaard - October 9, 2025 at Nebraska College of Law

In Indian Country Lawyers: A South Dakota Survery, authors Hannah Haksgaard and Bryce Drapeaux (both South Dakota Law) address the access to justice crisis experienced by Native American communities in South Dakota. They present data on the lack of available, licensed Native American attorneys on and near reservations to develop an accurate understanding of the extent of the shortage.

Macro-level structural forces, local institutions, race, class, livelihoods, culture, landscapes, and neighborhood dynamics all come together to create something greater than the sum of their parts. It is at this essential intersectional nexus that Amanda McMillan Lequieu’s 2024 book, Who We Are is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rust Belt, so adeptly advances the conversation on place-based marginalization and struggle. Who We Are identifies this holistic, multi-factor intersection of place, culture, and economic survival as something we all instinctively know, but may still struggle to define: “home.”