In Reimagining Rural Health Equity: Understanding Disparities And Orienting Policy, Practice, And Research In Rural America, Anne N. Sosin and Elizabeth A. Carpenter-Song (Both Anthropology, Dartmouth College) argue that advancing rural health equity beyond the pandemic requires understanding the underlying problems that create rural disparities and redesigning the policies and practices that encourage the rural disadvantage. 

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

In Fears and Fences: Social and Material Barriers to Plains Bison on the Canadian Prairies, authors Forrest Hisey, Melissa Heppner (both Geography, Geomatics, and Environment, University of Toronto, Mississauga), and Andrea Olive (Political Science, University of Toronto, Mississauga) conduct a qualitative study to determine the largest barriers to the “rewilding” of bison on the Canadian Great Plains with a particular focus on the colonial attitudes that conflict with Indigenous groups’ efforts to reintroduce bison.

In Shared Stewardship, Elizabeth Kronk Warner and Jesús A. Salazar (Both Law, University of Utah) challenge the trend of excluding tribes from participation of co-stewardship of national lands.  The authors examine the existing standards and offer creative solutions to forging a path to tribal co-stewardship.

Call for Papers - Law & Rurality Workshop - Hosted Virtually Fall 2025

In Uneven Growth and Unexpected Drivers of Ethnoracial Diversity across Nonmetropolitan and Metropolitan America, Matthew M. Brooks (Sociology and Center for Demography and Population Health, Florida State), J. Tom Mueller (Population Heath, University of Kansas Medical Center), Brian C. Thide (Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education and Population Research Institute, Pennsylvania State), and Daniel T. Lichter (Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell) bring attention to ethnoracial diversity in Nonmetropolitan America by providing an updated statistical portrait of ethnoracial diversity in the United States since 2000.  

In For Growth or Equity: A Taxonomy of ‘Bidenomics’ Place-Based Policies and Implications for US Regional Inequality, Grete Gansauer (Earth Sciences, Montana State University) develops a new taxonomy for classifying major place-based policy approaches passed during the Biden administration which were intended to promote national economic development while also providing investment for left-behind places.

In Disputes of Adverse Possession on Forestland and the Determinants of Case Outcomes, authors Hui Wang (School of Economics and Management, Beijing Forestry University) and Changyou Sun (Department of Forestry, Mississippi State University) examine the statistics of winning and losing adverse possession claims on forestland in the United States.

In The ‘Second Amendment of Food’: Some Reflections on American Liberalism, Mathilde Cohen (Connecticut Law) and Amy Cohen (Temple Law) explore Maine’s new “right to food” amendment by considering the history of the conception of the right to food, the legislative history of the amendment, and future implications as additional states begin to grapple with similar constitutional amendments.