Southern Rural Sociological Association
...an educational and scientific organization established to foster the study, understanding, and application of rural sociology in the South.
JOIN US FOR OUR NEXT CONFERENCE: SRSA Dates: Feb 2-3
SAAS 2025 - IRVING, TX - JAN 30-FEB 4, 2025
THE WESTIN IRVING CONVENTION CENTER AT LAS COLINAS & IRVING CONVENTION CENTER AT LAS COLINAS/SMG, & TEXICAN COURT
BOOK YOUR ROOM EARLY! HERE
July 10, 2024-September 30, 2024: Abstract submission portal open
August 28, 2024-September 30, 2024: Advanced Registration
October 1, 2024-November 30, 2024: Regular Registration
December 1, 2024-January 27, 2025: Late Registration
*After January 27, 2025 you must register on-site, requires an additional late fee.
Rural Communities: Policy, Practice, and Impact:
Urgency for Action
Rural people, communities, and issues are getting more attention and investment into needed areas like expanding infrastructure, protecting natural resources, improving access to health care, and strengthening local and regional food systems. Proactive policy initiatives and intentionality toward rural community initiatives are pumping billions of dollars into rural communities. Yet there is still much work to be done. Many rural people and their communities are not wholly experiencing these effects highlighting the need, nay, urgency for action and call for subject matter experts, practitioners, scholars, students, and storytellers of all types to come together in efforts to elevate rural communities, strengthen rural networks, and learn best practices from each other.
Threading within this theme and the request for abstracts is a call to action for those researching, working in, and/or living in rural America, more specifically, the rural South. What roles will rural sociology play in the post-Covid era? How will rural sociology attend to both policy gaps and policy imperatives in education, workforce development, health disparities, sustainable agriculture, environmental stewardship, rural development, and the digital transformation, just to name a few? What practical research applications and innovations are engaging communities and achieving impact?
The 2025 Southern Rural Sociological Association Annual Meeting seeks diverse forms of scholarly work, including narratives in the form of stories to introduce or redress theoretical frameworks, and collaborations between scholars, organizations, practitioners, and communities. Authentic rural representation requires the use of our wide range of senses to explore dimensions of qualitative and quantitative research to understand both current trends and future directions of rurality. We invite the submission of papers, posters, and panels to discuss the importance of rural livelihoods and data across time, topics, communities, struggles, and actions leading to pathways of resilience for rural people and rural communities.
Marcus Bernard, Ph.D.
SRSA 2024-2025 President