Media Rurality - Publications

Media Rurality, special serial issue of Heliotrope

Edited by Patrick Brodie and Darin Barney

Winter-Spring 2023

Contrary to persistent stereotypes of wilderness and countryside, rural locations are media-intensive. What forms of mediation emerge 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?

In June 2022, the Grierson Research Group convened a group of international scholars to discuss these questions, and more, at the intersection of media and emerging forms and practices of rurality. Drawing from a range of humanities and social sciences fields and discourses that foreground rural media technologies and experiences, the Media Rurality project investigates the centrality of rural places and people within the media systems and technologies that shape daily life in and across rural and urban settings alike, in diverse global locations. We are grateful to Heliotrope for the opportunity to share these essays, the first to arise from this exciting collaboration.

Media Rurality is supported by an SSHRC Connections Grant

Articles: 

Isabelle Boucher (Concordia), “Urban Mires: What Happened to the Garden of Moss?”

Burç Köstem (McGill), “’A Road Will Pass’: the Communicative Logic of Infrastructure in the Peripheries”

Assatu Wisseh (UC Santa Barbara), “The Media Production of Dark Ruralities”

Patrick Bresnihan (Maynooth) and Patrick Brodie (UC Dublin), “Energetic Mediation at Marconi’s Connemara Station”

Helen A. Hayes (McGill) and Janna Frenzel (Concordia), “Techno-Solutionism and Strategies of Delay: The Bay du Nord Development Project”

Laura Pannekoek (Concordia), with images by Paul Nadeau (Guelph), “One Place as Good as Another”

Laticia Chapman (Alberta), “The Imaginary of Emptiness, Newness, and Rural Ontologies: A Reflection After Media Rurality”

Darin Barney (McGill), “Autonomous Agriculture?”