Rural

The UC Davis Center for Poverty Research will host a major conference on the impact place has on poverty and effective interventions on November 13-14. Our own Professor Lisa Pruitt is the conference's organizer.

The UC Davis Department of Theatre and Dance will host The Grapes of Wrath Symposium on Friday, March 7, to explore John Steinbeck's work directly as well as the larger social, cultural and historical issues it raises, while celebrating this 75th anniversary year since the publication of the epic novel.

The symposium, open to the public and free-of-charge, will be held in Lab A at Wright Hall from 10:30 a.m. to 5:45 p.m.

Professor of Law Lisa Pruitt is also a faculty affiliate of the UC Davis Center for Poverty Research. She recently contributed to a podcast on Native Americans and Poverty.

From the Center's website:

In this edition of Poverty in Focus, visiting scholar Ezra Rosser and UC Davis Law professor and Center faculty affiliate Lisa Pruitt discuss a range of issues related to Native American Poverty, from its lack of visibility and interest for legal scholars to its causes and possible solutions. 

I don't watch TV or follow much pop culture, and most of the country music I occasionally listen to is from old albums by the likes of Sara Evans, Faith Hill, Martina McBride and Alison Krauss.  But this was apparently a big week in country music thanks to Brad Paisley and his new album Wheelhouse.

One of the most e-mailed items in the New York Times for the past day or so has been Claire Vaye Watkins "The Ivy League Was Another Planet." (The alternative headline is "Elite Colleges Are As Foreign as Mars.") In her op-ed, Watkins recounts her journey from nonmetropolitan Pahrump, Nevada to college at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Americans are often said to have a love-hate relationship with rural America. On the one hand, many wax nostalgic about the good old days, simpler times, the bond of "rural community" that many of our grandparents once lived, even if most of "us" grew up in the city.

In a prior post about Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford’s book, No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life, I mentioned Ross Douthat’s assertion that “the downscale, the rural and the working-class” whites were most disadvantaged in elite college admissions.

Wealth and income inequality have been getting a lot of attention in recent months--at least in the New York Times.

A headline in today's NYT proclaims, "'Culture of Poverty,' Once an Academic Slur, Makes a Comeback." Journalist Patricia Cohen writes of a new (or renewed) academic turn to discussions of poverty in relation to culture, and she recalls a time when such discussions became politically incorrect.

In a recent post, I commented on what the film “Winter’s Bone” might reveal about white privilege.  There I discussed Ree Dolly, the film’s heroine, in the overwhelmingly white context of Taney County, Missouri, where the median household income is about 75% of the national median.  (In neighboring persistent poverty Ozark