5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Rurality has emerged as an important axis of analysis in US sociolegal scholarship. Among access to justice scholars, there is growing attention to the problem of rural ‘legal deserts’ and the limits of lawyer-centric models for delivering legal assistance and expertise. Environmental and land use scholars criticize US energy policies that pit urban against rural communities and minimize the role of state regulation in creating and perpetuating geographic inequities. Patterns of migration and political polarization increasingly break along urban/rural lines—though popular rhetoric about rural America is also marked by cultural myths and implicit urbanormativity. This session seeks to build connections between US scholarship on rurality and related work in other parts of the world, and to consider how this work informs broader questions about the relationship between place, justice, and expertise.