Professor Pruitt Talks to Washington Post, L.A. Times, CBC About VP Candidates and Rurality

International media outlets have sought Professor Lisa R. Pruitt’s perspective on what the selections of Republican Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance and Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as vice presidential candidates might mean from a rural, working-class perspective.

Pruitt, president-elect of the Rural Sociological Society, spoke to the Washington Post for an Aug. 9 story on the “White Dudes for Harris” movement that began with a 200,000-person Zoom call that gathered supporters for the Democratic ticket.

Pruitt lent perspective to an Aug. 15 Los Angeles Times piece that highlighted the largely conservative Nebraska towns where Walz grew up.

On Aug. 11, Pruitt discussed how the white working class has become a force in American politics on CBC radio’s “The Sunday Magazine with Piya Chattopadhyay.”  

In a July 24 HuffPost essay, headlined “JD Vance, Much Like Trump, Is a Media Creation,” writer Michael Arceneux quoted Pruitt’s criticism of Vance from 2019, when she wrote that Vance used his best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy to “support ill-formed policy prescriptions.”  

On Sept. 12, Pruitt spoke to the Brazilian newspaper Estadão for a story about how Vance and Walz are competing for rural votes.

Distinguished Professor of Law Lisa R. Pruitt is a scholar whose recent work explores the legal relevance of rural spatiality, including how it inflects dimensions of gender, race, and ethnicity. Pruitt's work also considers rural-urban difference in transnational and international contexts. She is the recipient of the law school’s 2020 Distinguished Teaching Award.