Media Rurality – 16-17 June, 2022  [Schedule]

Wind farms next to hearth-heated houses. Cell phone towers on isolated mountaintops. Data centers in sight of grazing cattle. Mining roads, pipelines and transmission lines cutting through Indigenous lands and waters. Satellite feeds providing maps for logging operations. Drones buzzing over genetically-modified croplands. Dams drawing energy from remote rivers and fiber optic cables landing on remote beaches. Contrary to persistent stereotypes of empty wilderness and countryside, rural locations are media-intensive. What forms of mediation come into focus when we foreground the “rural” in the function of media systems and technologies? How do these forms of mediation affect how we think about, inhabit and relate to rurality?

Media Rurality is a two-day public hybrid online/in-person colloquium which will raise these questions with a two-dozen scholars in the humanities and critical social sciences from a range of ranks, disciplines, and global contexts, with the aim of reorienting media studies in relation to contemporary rural experience. Focussing on the forms, practices and technologies that mediate rural relationships, Media Rurality draws on materialist approaches to media and infrastructure to expose the centrality and currency of rural experience, and to reverse misleading culturalist characterizations of rurality as distant and lagging.

You can find speaker bios and abstracts here. Each presentation will feature a short response from a graduate student affiliate of the event, and you can find these participants and bios here.

The event will take place at the MacDonald Campus of McGill University, which you can learn about and how to get to here.

There are a very limited number of in-person registration slots available to the public. Please email the organizers at mediarurality.ahcs@mcgill.ca with your name and the date you plan to attend, and spots will be distributed on a first come, first served basis.

You can watch the second day of the colloquium live here.

Revised colloquium papers will be collected and edited for publication as a special edition of an international journal, or as an edited collection on a major university press. More details TBA.