The New York Times, June 29, 2024, 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?
