Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research 2026

Cultivating Rurality: Building Community around Rural Research will bring together scholars, community leaders from across the U.S., and professionals who work with rural populations or in rural spaces. During the symposium, attendees will be invited to collaborate in theorizing rurality, share how it impacts their work, examine how rurality is represented and celebrated, and begin to discuss challenges faced by rural communities. The symposium will take a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary look at the subject of rurality through the lenses of law, medicine, education, sustainability, business, social science, and the arts. Cultivating Rurality aims to identify and connect faculty members and others at the University of Iowa who are already engaged in rural research and teaching, and will also include several events open to the public. Participants will leave the symposium with new scholarly tools and professional connections to more effectively address interdisciplinary issues of rurality in the future, including problem-solving challenges faced by rural communities, both in Iowa and elsewhere, such as resource extraction, limited investment and digital infrastructure, low quality water and food, and rural-to-urban migration.