Leaving Fury Road

This issue marks the departure of Rural Sociology from Penn State, moving the journal to Brigham Young University (BYU) from 2021. My three-year term as the editor has been a remarkable service experience to the scholarly community of our discipline. What made it truly unique is the opportunity to work closely together with colleagues in the editorial team whose dedication to the journal was second to none. I would like to offer my heartfelt gratitude to all of them, starting with Marianne Stevens, who provided outstanding logistical and managing editor support over the years. It was also a privilege to work with the Associate Editors: Cristina Bradatan (Texas Tech University), Kathy Brasier (Penn State University), Michael Cope (the book review editor, Brigham Young University), Katherine Curtis (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Matthew Sanderson (Kansas State University), Kai Schafft (Penn State University), and Theresa Selfa (SUNY ESF), who helped setting the course for the flagship journal’s operation and publication dynamics during this time. In the first issue of 2018, shortly after I took over the journal, I wrote “Our plan is that the yet unknown next editor of the journal will also join us in 2020 to ensure a smooth transition of duties.” As many of you know, the next editor is Carol Ward from BYU, who did indeed join Rural Sociology as an Associate Editor earlier this year. Over the past months, she assembled her team and we have been working together on the transition logistics. I am absolutely confident that the journal will be in great hands in the following years. As a small preview of what is being prepared, I would like to highlight two special issues in the making: one on rural race and ethnicity and one on rural populism in Europe—both are expected to be published in 2021. I also want to thank the support of our home organization, the Rural Sociological Society, for providing full editorial freedom over running the journal. I know how valuable this freedom is, because not all editors are given such unlimited agency by their respective disciplinary organizations. The journal’s leading role in the field would not have been possible without the professional assistance of Wiley, our publisher, through their supportive and ever evolving partnership. I want to thank everybody who submitted papers to the journal too. As we know, not all papers can be accepted and published, but scholarship should never stop because of a peer rejection, instead it should come back better and stronger. Finally, I want to express my appreciation for the work of our reviewers. Blind peer review is the backbone of academic publication process, and it often goes unrecognized despite the time and effort reviewers dedicate to the field. In the first issue of 2018, I expressed hope that in the new era of populism, following the 2016 U.S. elections and similar political outcomes across the globe, we are not looking at a “Thunderdome-style, existential clash between rural rednecks and latte liberals,” a misguided dichotomous perspective of many, mostly urban-based, pundits at that time. Scholarship in the past years, including papers published in Rural Sociology, made the urban-rural dichotomy irreversibly outdated as a conceptual framework for understanding spatial dynamics. At the same time, when it comes to measurement, especially when looking at long-term trends, it is far more difficult to challenge the inertia in both data and labels and move to a more nuanced system. This is an increasing problem in post-truth times when simplified narratives that cater to declining attention spans tend to trump not only more complex arguments but simple facts too. Yet, no matter how one perceives or measures rurality, its contextual significance in economy, culture, identity, and social organization has not diminished in recent years. One does not need to go further than the current global pandemic. Hopefully, years from now life under the pandemic with social distancing, limited personal interaction, digital fatigue, and over-politicized public health measures will be nothing but a distant bad memory. But scholarship will no doubt discuss and analyze how the pandemic impacted rural areas. Rural sociologists will point out again the persistent institutional capacity and resource challenges in rural places, this time in handling a health crisis, as well as how communities have come together or were split when addressing the difficulties. They will write about how preferences toward rural environments, from premium access to outdoors and low density living to permissive regulatory policy regimes have changed, making a difference in rural life, let that be demographic reversals for some and rural gentrification for others. Coming out of the Great Recession and heading into the pandemic in the era of populism may not have been as harsh as the Thunderdome. Yet, looking back at the past three years, the boiling and exploding social tension, the foolishly unleashed identity politics, and the long existing and seemingly unfixable structural inequalities left many with the uneasy feeling that some things are fundamentally broken in society. The road we walked increasingly looked like Fury Road, with polarized and divided tribes, the “us and them” feeling promoted for political gain, and the morally prescribed right and wrong behavior where the price of belonging was unquestioned compliance. In 2021, we have a chance to leave the wasteland of Fury Road behind. Now more than ever, we need rural sociologists to keep a cool head and both feet on the ground in the political discourse of the day, continue analyzing rural social dynamics, and provide evidence-based results to policy makers. Rural sociology, the field, is still the best equipped to lead the academic and practitioner discourse. That is our responsibility as scholars and citizens alike. Make no mistake: populism will not go away, just as history has not ended in 1990 either. It will stay with us as a stark reminder of the dark side of economic and cultural globalization and the rightful complaints of those who received none of its benefits. Moreover, it will probably maintain a seemingly simple distinction between urban and rural in the fundamental responses to it. But we do not need to go back where we had been these years. There are no lovely days on Fury Road, no matter which tribe one is fighting for. Thank you for the opportunity to serve the field in this capacity. I wish the next editorial team the best, and I hope to see many of you in person once we are done with the pandemic

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