How ‘Rural Studies’ Is Thinking About the Heartland

Kristin Lunz Trujillo grew up proud of her family’s way of life. She spent summers getting ready to show cattle at the county fair. During the school year, she rushed home after class to feed the chickens on her family’s corn and soybean farm. Neither of her parents went to college, but they encouraged their daughter when she decided to go to Carleton, a liberal arts school a two-hour drive from their farm in Minnesota.

Despite being physically close to home, Ms. Lunz Trujillo was surprised by how foreign her upbringing seemed at the college. She was dismayed when she checked out the farm club and learned that its members wanted to brew kombucha, not milk cows. When an art history teacher asked students which famous paintings they’d seen in person, Ms. Lunz Trujillo stayed quiet, because she had never been to an art museum. This sense of cultural alienation molded her research when she became a political scientist: What is rural identity? How does it shape a person’s politics?

This year, Ms. Lunz Trujillo, now an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, was reading a new, best-selling book that cited her research to explore those same questions. But this recognition didn’t bring the thrill she might have expected.

“It seemed to be more of a hit piece on rural America,” she said.

Published in February, “White Rural Rage,” by the journalist Paul Waldman and the political scientist Tom Schaller, is an unsparing assessment of small-town America. Rural residents, the authors argued, are more likely than city dwellers to excuse political violence, and they pose a threat to American democracy.

Several rural scholars whose research was included in the book immediately denounced it. In a critical Politico essay, Nick Jacobs, a political scientist at Colby College, wrote, “Imagine my surprise when I picked up the book and saw that some of that research was mine.” Ms. Lunz Trujillo excoriated the book in an opinion piece for Newsweek as “a prime example of how intellectuals sow distrust by villainizing” people unlike them.