Written by: Blake Etringer

The Iowa City Public Library will come alive in March with scholars, community leaders, and professionals from across the U.S. for the 2026 Obermann Symposium, Cultivating Rurality: Building Community Around Rural Research – which is being led by several Iowa Law faculty members.

University of Iowa College of Law faculty members Brian R. Farrell and Daria Fisher Page, along with former colleague Ryan T. Sakoda who is now at U.C. Berkeley Law, are behind the symposium, taking place March 26-27, 2026, which aims to identify and connect faculty and researchers at the University of Iowa who are engaged in rural scholarship. Organizers hope to lay the groundwork for future interdisciplinary conversations around rurality—conversations that extend beyond the two-day event.

Cultivating the idea

The idea for Cultivating Rurality grew out of a collaborative project between Farrell and Fisher Page focused on rural access to justice. As they worked on the proposal, they discovered a growing body of scholarship centered on “law and rurality,” a field that examines how legal systems, institutions, and practices intersect with rural life.

“Through this process, I became familiar with the field and the people who were writing, researching, and teaching in it,” Farrell said. “I saw natural connections to my interest in rural issues and rural practice. I began to see that rurality could be a unifying aspect for many fields.”

Fisher Page echoed that realization, noting that faculty across campus were already deeply engaged in rural work—often without knowing one another’s endeavors. “Through my work on rural access to justice and my interest in community-engaged research and scholarship, I’ve met several other faculty at the University of Iowa doing really exciting work about—and with—rural communities,” she said. “It felt like many of these interactions, though, were due to chance or word of mouth.” 

At its core, the symposium is intended as a starting point. Farrell described the event as an effort to identify who is already engaged in rural-focused teaching, research, and service, and to begin building connections among them. From there, the hope is to foster ongoing conversations about how universities engage with rural communities, how rural students are represented in higher education, and what responsibilities institutions have to rural places.

Challenging narrow perceptions of rurality and legal deserts

Identifying and mapping this work is only part of the goal. The symposium is also intended to encourage future collaboration across disciplines and to challenge narrow understandings of rural life. As Fisher Page put it, definitions of rurality tend to overlook the creativity and complexity of rural communities.

“Rurality is often defined as that which isn’t urban, an approach which completely glosses over the complexity of rural communities and the challenges and opportunities that exist in these spaces,” she said.

One of the key issues that helped spark these broader conversations is the concept of “legal deserts,” a term describing areas with limited access to legal services. The American Bar Association has used the term to identify counties with fewer lawyers per capita than the national average, defined as one lawyer per 1,000 residents.

“It’s a useful metric that allows us to color a map and say, here are counties that have more attorneys than average, and here are counties that have fewer attorneys than average,” Farrell said. At the same time, he emphasized that the concept can be overly simplistic. Measuring access by the number of attorneys per county does not account for how far people are willing to travel for services, whether lawyers are practicing in areas of community need, or whether alternative forms of legal support might better serve rural populations.

These questions—about access, representation, and how services are structured—extend beyond law and into healthcare, education, and the arts, making this topic well suited for an interdisciplinary forum like this symposium. 

Interdisciplinary speakers and panelists 

Among the list of guest speakers is Katy B. Kozhimannil of the University of Minnesota, who will speak on rural healthcare with a focus on maternal care—a topic of growing concern in many rural communities. Andrew Mink of the Smithsonian will offer a perspective on rural programming and public history, and Esther Peeren will join from the University of Amsterdam and present on representations of rurality in film and literature.

Panels will also examine what rurality means in practice—whether as a place, a population, or a way of life—and how universities can more intentionally engage with rural communities. Organizers were also deliberate in highlighting University of Iowa faculty, allowing visibility into work that may begin building cross-campus relationships.

For Farrell, that visibility matters, particularly for students. Coming from a rural background himself, he sees value in making rural experiences and scholarship more visible within legal education and higher education more broadly. 

“I’m hoping that this won’t just be an event for faculty,” he said, “but that it also might allow others on campus to realize that there are people here who share their rural backgrounds or career aspirations.” 

In that sense, Cultivating Rurality is as much about recognition as it is about research: recognizing rural communities as complex and vital, recognizing the people already engaged in this work, and recognizing the potential for something lasting to grow from these conversations. 

Farrell is also featured in the article “Building community around rural research,” discussing the symposium. To learn more about the event, visit the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies website.