Tired tropes about scarcity and backwardness obscure stories about diversity and innovation.
Close your eyes and imagine a rural person. What do you see?
Now hold on to that image … we’ll get back to it.
Growing up, I traded urban and rural values each Wednesday and every other weekend while being shuttled between one parent who lived in the Atlanta suburbs and the other in the rolling foothills of Appalachia.
Even with that partial education in rural life, I find myself constantly contending with my blind spots, which I’ve become even more acutely aware of since last October, when I joined Open Campus and became the nation’s only national reporter dedicated to rural higher education.
Take a recent piece I wrote co-published with Open Campus and The Washington Post about rural broadband, headlined Despite pandemic promises, many rural students still lack fast internet.
