“An Uphill Battle”: The Politics of Rural Inequality, Activism, and Social Change

The election of Donald Trump brought rurality and rural inequality to the forefront of the social and political domains. However, long before the 2016 presidential election, rural communities across the United States had been shaped by structural inequality and neglected by social policy. The complexities of rural life are often overshadowed by urbannormativity, with policy and policy-makers mostly focused on largely populated regions rather than people living rurally. Researchers, too, often neglect the rural context in their work, relegating nonmetropolitan community contexts as unworthy of attention through the overwhelming use of generalized statistics and unhelpful definitions of “rural.” In this dissertation, I argue that rurality contributes its own dimension of social inequality by exacerbating the lived experiences of vulnerability. Housing is limited and tainted by small town politics and poverty stigmatization. Food deserts and food quality create immense strain for those who are vulnerable and cannot afford to purchase their own food. Education systems act as both schools and social work agencies, helping young people navigate their family’s struggles. Rural healthcare systems are fractured and, oftentimes, nonexistent. These fraught, cyclical realities are a long-standing phenomenon, and despite popularized notions about the rural idyll, inequality and suffering color much of the lived experience for those who are vulnerable and living rurally. Through the use of a community-based, action-oriented research approach and arts-based visual ethnographic methods, I shine a light on and humanize the lived experiences of rural inequality. From this work, I examine not only the fraught reality of rural vulnerability, but also the agentic strategies rural activists and vulnerable folks use to respond to their circumstances. In doing so, I demonstrate the ways rural people and pockets of high and persistent vulnerability are relegated to marginalized corners of American society. This work can – and should – be used in scholarly, activist, political, and grassroots-oriented work to promote structural attention on rural America