Abstract

While living in what has been designated the Century of the City by the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation and the journal Nature, it is the field of rural sociology that is perhaps best equipped to investigate, comprehend, and help overcome many of the challenges directly linked to these shifting demographics.   Drawing from my ongoing research projects, examples are given to illustrate the value of our toolkit and intellectual heterodoxy for grappling with some of today’s most pressing anxieties.  The empirical projects I draw from include my work on digital agriculture, rural-urban tensions, and conceptualizing producer-consumer linkages in the content of ethical eating and conceptions of good farming.  I also seek to push the field in the direction of doing scholarship that is more reflexive about its underlying normative assumptions, which involves erecting frameworks around being able to articulate not only what we are against but also what we are for—a type of critical, yet hopeful, scholarship.