Media Rurality

Media Rurality is an edited volume that reconceptualizes rural places as intensively mediated and infrastructurally central to contemporary media systems.

Edited by Darin Barney and Patrick Brodie, the book assembles geographically diverse case studies showing how rural territories host data centers, energy production, experimental telecommunications, and other infrastructures tied to global capitalism and colonial histories.

Contributors analyze how these processes produce uneven political subjectivities, extractive economies, and environmental burdens in rural spaces while challenging stereotypes that cast the countryside as technologically empty.

The volume emphasizes infrastructure as a lens for understanding rurality’s plurality and the political stakes of mediation across urban and rural divides.

It serves as both an empirical compendium and a theoretical provocation for scholars interested in media, infrastructure, and rural studies.