Answering this question both ways around is what I’ll be spending the rest of the book doing. But let me spend a few pages now giving an overview of rural sociology for the reader on the run. Inevitably, compressing the argument of an entire book on rural sociology into a few pages makes for somewhat thick and perhaps tedious reading, especially for those less familiar with the goals and manners of academic rural sociology. Readers who find themselves getting bogged down in the rest of this chapter are hereby cordially invited to skip ahead to Chapter 2, to hear immediately from the farmers themselves. Don’t worry about missing anything. You’ll still get the whole argument, but in less abstracted—and less abstract—form.
Seminar in Rural Sociology
Description: This Fall, 2004, the emerging Rural Sociology Program will commence a weekly brown-bag seminar series, which may be taken for graduate credit. Anyone, however, is welcome to any event. The theme for this Fall will be Agriculture and Diversity. The format of the seminar will be short presentations (20 minutes preferred; 30 minutes max) followed by discussion (45 minutes).
Graduate students are strongly encouraged to present, as are UW faculty and visitors. The first speaker will be the British agroecologist Professor Jules Pretty of the Centre for Environment and Society at the University of Essex.
Instructors: Michael M. Bell, Associate Professor of Rural Sociology, michaelbell@wisc.edu; William L. Bland, Professor of Soil Science, wlbland@wisc.edu
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A few words about methodology. In keeping, I believe, with the spirit of PFI, this book is a species of what has come to be called “participatory research”—that is, research in which the people under study help conduct the study. Two of my colleagues in this project, Donna and Sue, are longtime members of PFI. Donna is a former member of the board of PFI and farms in western Iowa with her husband and son. Sue has been an active volunteer in PFI since its beginning, and her husband, Rick Exner, was one of the people involved in founding the organization in 1985 and was long PFI’s only employee. Greg and I represent more the external and academic side of the project, Greg as a former graduate student in sociology at Iowa State University and now an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Fox Valley, and I as an associate professor of sociology at Iowa State, and now at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where I am an associate professor of rural sociology. Neither Greg nor I had any previous personal connections to PFI or farming before the research began.
And yet it is there with us three times every day (or more, if you’re like me) when we bring the rural sociology deep into our urban mouths, although we may scarcely think of it. Food connects us all to agriculture. What we choose to eat and not to eat has enormous implications for what goes on in places like Iowa. Food makes farmers of us all, whether we are aware of it or not.
rural sociology, environmental sociology, michael m. bell, sustainable agriculture