When: Tuesday, 24 September 2024, 3:00pm - 4:30pm (UTC+3).
Where: Main Building, F3020. You can also join us online via Zoom:
Meeting ID: 698 8409 0650
Passcode: 921724
Title: Making Rural America: A Legal History
Abstract: The law does not land on all spaces equally, and the law is made meaningful in relation to place and people. This talk will discuss different examples of how rural identity was constituted through law and policy conflict. Rural residents, as well as policy makers, invoked tropes about decline and nostalgia, the frontier, and the pioneer and family farm as rhetorical strategies to articulate ruralness in modern America. Rural communities asserted rural values, norms, and identities through legal mechanisms, manifesting “the rural” in law, space, and culture. However, rural residents were not alone in considering what it meant to be rural and what place rural communities might have in modern America. Non-rural state actors, courts, and experts were also participants in the legal and political contests over what the rural should be and exerted control over rural experience. Twentieth-century rural communities were forced to adapt to and endure upon a national landscape—literally and figuratively—dominated by suburban and urban communities and interests. While there is no one quintessential rural legal experience, this talk considers how all rural communities were constituted in significant part through and with the law.