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Jean Hardy Profile picture
Jean Hardy
@jean__hardy
Assistant Professor @MediaInfoMSU. Director @RuralComputing. Researcher of rural tech economies, policy, & development. Hobby goat farmer. Michigander. (he/him)
Jun 3, 2020 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
200 people showed up today to this #blacklivesmatter rally organized by local teenagers in Marinette, WI despite dozens of death threats from local white supremacists. Marinette is a little remote city of 10K people about 60 miles north of Green Bay. ImageImage We were fortunate enough to have folks open-carrying on our side to show that we aren't fucking around. One of the reasons I love the rural left :-)
May 27, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
This piece by @MarkMuro1 @BrookingsInst is asking interesting questions, but I think a more pressing question is, will an increase in telework get people to the rural communities where they are needed most? My dissertation research says no, a thread. 1/

brookings.edu/blog/the-avenu… There's decades of research at this point in rural sociology and geography that show amenity-rich rural places (e.g., the communities in the intermountain west near national parks, skiing, etc) have captured the vast majority of rural population growth since the 1980s. 2/
Oct 16, 2019 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
More rural poverty porn, this time in the guise of education deserts in rural Michigan. Bachelors degrees won't save rural communities, and here's a few reasons why: Framing 4yr degree granting institutions as ticket out of rural poverty is misleading and bad journalism (see @tressiemcphd's work on how for-profit colleges have taken advantage of this push for 4yr degrees by exploiting poor people, people of color, and women's financial aid $)
Sep 27, 2019 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
One of my favorite things about living in a rural place is not feeling the social pressure (and resulting guilt) of needing to engage in new convenience economy services: no uber eats, no same day delivery, no lyft, no scooters. It’s wild to think about the millions of people tricked into participating in this weird race to the bottom because of the economic and social pressures to take advantage of new services that make their life easier so they can spend more time working or hating themselves i guess
Sep 13, 2019 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I agree that Internet infrastructure as the lone way we address urban and rural digital disparity is a poor route, but this @washingtonpost op-ed is full of bad statistics and misrepresentation of the Internet needs of rural America: a thread Yes, three times as many urban households are without broadband, but over four times as many people live in urban areas than rural areas. So, proportionally more rural people are without broadband.
Jul 15, 2019 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I've been engaged for 18 months and am getting married in less than a month. It's been phenomenal to have relatives and friends actively going to bat for me with homophobic relatives who are on the fence about attending. My fiancé's sister drove to fucking Tennessee two weeks ago and convinced my future in-laws to attend the wedding (even though they've never acknowledged I exist). My own sister has been having very intentional conversations with loved ones about their attendance for over a year.
Jul 1, 2019 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I have a new article out in @icsjournal called Queer Information Literacies: Social and technological circulation in the rural Midwestern United States. You can find the pdf here (doi.org/10.1080/136911…) and a blog post about it here (wordpress.com/post/jean.lgbt…). In it, I document the various information sources that rural LGBTQ people use to learn about LGBTQ topics and meet other LGBTQ people. It's based on a year and a half of ethnographic fieldwork in the Upper Midwest.
Jun 30, 2019 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I’m glad to see an article from an outlet such as @Slate highlighting the difficulties of visibility for gay men in rural areas, & how technology helps add nuance to being visible. Though the framing and language used for men in the closet is unfair and judgmental. The author goes into the project expecting most of the faceless/pictureless profiles to be closeted and then finds out most are actually out gay men that are navigating the complexities of what it means to be gay in their small towns.
Mar 11, 2019 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
The @UMichDiversity Office is holding a panel next week on the worth of diversity. One of the panelists is Mark Perry, an economics and finance professor @UMFlint who is funded by the American Enterprise Institute to take down diversity initiatives at universities. He calls university programs that target the education of women "discriminatory," and has filed formal complaints with the Department of Education to get these programs shut down.

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Feb 22, 2019 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
While I agree with general premise of this op-ed, as of 2016 rural people were self-employed at higher rates than urban people. One reason entrepreneurship isn't growing in rural places is because current forms of what it looks like doesn't align with rural values or experience. Yes, rural entrepreneurship is shrinking, but maybe that's not rural people's faults. Maybe that's because we live in economic systems that don't think rural ideas and ways of doing things matter.
Jan 10, 2019 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
New guidelines that will allow folks on Medicaid and Medicare to use telehealth likely won't be useful for rural folks internet issues, in fact it may be detrimental. 1/4 Instead of being able to lobby and organize for more nearby specialized health services, the go-to response from higher-ups will be that their insurance covers telehealth and therefore there isn't a need for expanded rural services. 2/4
Jan 9, 2019 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
ShopKo, a small department store (ala Kmart) that serves primarily rural and small-town areas of the Midwest and Mountain states, is likely filing for bankruptcy: wbay.com/content/news/P… This spells disaster for the small towns that most of these stores are in. Discount stores like Dollar General or Family Dollar will never be able to make up the variety of products that ShopKo sells.
Dec 27, 2018 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I finally got to reading this article this morning. What this tweet by Harper’s missed is the really phenom weaving of individual vs. collective understandings of self with narrative of ppl who would influence creation of the Internet from 30s to the present. Highly recommend! First thought after reading: one thing I think this essay collapses for ease of understanding is identity politics as individual rather than collective.
Dec 24, 2018 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
My favorite (#sarcasm) response to my piece in @CityLab has been that rural America is 1) only for white people; and 2) way more racist than coastal cities. Anyone who has spent time in rural communities in the South, Southwest, or understands why tribal land exists where it does (in places that were seen as undesirable AKA remote af) knows that #1 is not true.
Dec 15, 2018 • 13 tweets • 2 min read
It’s Saturday morning and I need to spend some time pushing back against this article: a thread The “rural economy” is framed as a problem that no one knows how to solve, yet there’s decades of research and policy that have shown exactly how to do this through SME clustering and specialization, placemaking, etc.
Oct 7, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
If you are going to hold individual Republican voters accountable for the appointment of Kavanaugh, then do you also hold individual Democrat voters accountable for shitty things recent Dem prezs have done (e.g., bombing Yemen)? This is one reason (among many) why voting is an imperfect political tactic among many. A vast majority of us vote for politicians that don’t wholly represent us.
Jun 27, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It's been pretty upsetting the past couple weeks to see corporate ad after corporate ad leveraging Pride™ without ever mentioning LGBTQ+ people in any sense. While I don't need or want capitalism's acceptance, it's just so amazing how quickly "love is love" has been able to devolve into an even more useless parade of rainbows and vague mentions of "equality" or "diversity."
Jun 16, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I don’t think a lot of people understand how dramatically different rural places are from each other and how this at scale isn’t going to happen in a centralized way without MAJOR intervention from federal and state gov’ts “Cracking the code” in a rural mountain town in the Rockies is gonna look HELLA different than an agricultural town in Mississippi.
Jun 15, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The most disrespectful group of people in the United States are retired white people. I was at a local history lecture at a library tonight and when the Q&A started, 50% of the crowd (of 95% retired white ppl) got up and started talking to each other...
Jun 12, 2018 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I don't know how long ago it happened, but I'm saddened to hear that @UWContinuingEd discontinued the Evening Degree Program and moved to an all online set-up. As an alum of the Evening Degree Program, the relationships I built with my professors in face-to-face courses were drastically different than any relationships with profs in my online courses (even when topics of online courses were something I was super interested in).
May 22, 2018 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
New report on what unites and divides urban, suburban, and rural communities (pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/wha…). Will likely write a blog post about it next week after I've recovered from a week and a half of driving all over the state of Michigan for research. At first glance (I go straight to the rural stuff obvi), interesting way to define rural: "Rural ZIP codes were defined as those having 127 or fewer households per square mile" (p. 81).