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Media Rurality

Cover photo on Media Rurality depicts mountains in the far background, behind a city, and winding roads leading to rural fields in the foreground. Read the Introduction

Book

Pages: 350

Illustrations: 39 illustrations

Published: April 2026

Editors: Patrick Brodie, Darin Barney

Contributors: Christopher Ali, Patrick Bresnihan, Jenna Burrell, Jordan B Kinder, Burc Kostem, Cindy Kaiying Lin, Emily Ng, Lisa Parks, Anne Pasek, Esther Peeren, Nicole Starosielski, Ishita Tiwary, Hunter Vaughan, Ayesha Vemuri, Megan Wiessner, Assatu Wisseh

Media Rurality investigates the centrality of rural places and people within the media systems and technologies that shape daily life in and across rural and urban settings alike. From the boglands of Ireland to data centers in the Oregon countryside to the homemade media systems of rural Tanzania, the contributors to this volume show how rural territories are highly mediated, technologized spaces profoundly enmeshed with global capitalism and colonialism. Approaching the study of rurality through a materialist lens that foregrounds infrastructure, this collection shows how rural spaces often bear the environmental brunt of capitalist development while being relegated to the economic and cultural periphery.

Contributors. Christopher Ali, Patrick Bresnihan, Patrick Brodie, Darin Barney, Jenna Burrell, Jordan B. Kinder, Burç Köstem, Cindy Lin, Emily Ng, Lisa Parks, Anne Pasek, Esther Peeren, Nicole Starosielski, Ishita Tiwary, Hunter Vaughan, Ayesha Vemuri, Megan Wiessner, Assatu Wisseh

Praise

“This remarkably original collection offers a much needed intervention, centering the role of rural spaces to media and infrastructure. The way the contributors engage with issues of uneven connections and energy transitions, and with rural entanglements within global supply chains and planetary mines, is superb.” - Rahul Mukherjee, author of Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty

“A rurality of omnidirectional connectivity; sites of roiling metabolisms of extraction, resistance, and media intensiveness; a rurality of emergence and theoretical complexity. This volume expands the boundaries of rural spaces, lives, and politics as media ruralities that are peopled and place-based, enduring and vital, and essential for research addressing contemporary debates in global media studies.” - Rafico Ruiz, author of Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier

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Information

Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

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Patrick Brodie is Assistant Professor in the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin.

Darin Barney is Professor of Communication Studies at McGill University.

Table Of Contents

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Media Rurality / Patrick Brodie and Darin Barney  1
Part I. Extractive Mediations
1. Green Data Capitalism and Its Rural Extractions / Megan Wiessner, Anne Pasek, Nicole Starosielski, and Hunter Vaughan  41
2. Scenes of Extraction: Mediating Rurality, Wilderness, and Hinterland in Dutch and Chinese Film / Emily Ng and Esther Peeren  65
3. Imperial Wireless: Energetic Mediation at Marconi’s Connemara Station / Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie  88
4. Mediated Extraction: The Production of Dark Ruralities in the Atlantic World / Assatu Wisseh  113
Part II. Practicing Rurality
5. Mediating the Periphery: Metabolism and Technicity on the Outskirts of Istanbul / Burç Köstem  133
6. Domestic Solar Media in Rural Tanzania: Toward an Energy-Media Matrix / Lisa Parks  157
7. Hong Kong in Siliguri/Dhulabari: Exploring Media Objects and Border Towns / Ishita Tiwary  179
8. The Preservation of Embodied Masculinity in Rural Tech-Altered Workplaces / Jenna Burrell  200
Part III. Political Ruralities
9. Gas Can Imaginaries: On the Politics of Combustion, Anti-Urban Resentment, and Playing Indian at the 2022 Freedom Convoy / Jordan B. Kinder  227
10. Where the Market Dares Not Tread: Mapping Rural Broadband in the United States / Christopher Ali  252
11. The Virtual Fire / Cindy Kaiying Lin  277
12. Embankment Economies, Soaking Ecologies, and the Conservation Zone of Kaziranga / Ayesha Vemuri  296
Acknowledgments  323
Contributors  329
Index  333

 

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Additional Information

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Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3325-7 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-2979-3 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6200-4 / DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478062004