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AbstractThis article discusses the growing political divide in the United States and how ideological polarization has increasingly assumed spatial dimensions, as rural areas have become strongly associated with Republican support, and urban areas have become associated with strong Democratic support. In the context of the recent Trump administration, marked not only by authoritarian tendencies, ethno‐nationalism, and hostility towards democratic institutions, but its denouement represented by the U.S. Capitol insurrection on January 6th, 2021 and the weeks that followed, what are the implications for growing spatialized civic and political divides, and indeed for democracy itself? I discuss several main approaches taken by social scientists to explain the relationship between spatial and political divides in the United States, including those that focus on shifting political geographies, cultural factors, economic anxiety, and racial resentment. Then, pointing to several recent exemplars, I identify theoretical, methodological, and perspectival strengths that the discipline of rural sociology can and should engage in developing explanatory frameworks for better understanding these social and spatial shifts – shifts that are simultaneously crises of democracy and crises of epistemology.

AbstractThe mobilities 'turn' within human geography and the social sciences has drawn attention to the ways in which social connections and interactions variously transcend, undo and reconfigure spatial boundaries and identities. In this study we utilise mobilities theory to analyse Marcellus Shale gas boomtown growth in Pennsylvania and the experiences of local residents living in these boomtown areas. We use data from interviews conducted in two rural counties of Pennsylvania to examine the intersection and interaction between diverse boomtown mobilities and local places. We use mobilities theory to illustrate the extent to which local experience of boomtown development is a product of the interaction between the particularities of material and ideological rural community characteristics perceived as more or less 'fixed', and the various externally‐originating mobilities associated with local industrial buildout.

In this paper we discuss cultural trauma with regard to the Hungarian Roma. While the concept of cultural trauma is typically understood as connected to a discrete event and achieves recognition as cultural trauma through a process of broader social recognition, we argue that in the case of the Roma, cultural trauma is characterized not by a particular event but rather by a long history of exclusion, marginalization and persecution. Secondly, the cultural and discursive framing of Roma citizenship as "second-class" (and therefore as not "truly" Hungarian) operates as: 1) a causal factor in the historical trauma of the Roma; 2) a constitutive part of the trauma itself (the trauma as being "othered" while simultaneously having one's traumatic experience denied); and 3) a barrier to the broader recognition and acknowledgment of that traumatic history and experience. We discuss data from recent fieldwork with Romani selfgovernment leaders to discuss how these phenomena manifest themselves as Romani leaders attempt to achieve political agency in the face of contemporary far-right political movements.