Rural Routes Podcast was a podcasts series on rural issues I published while working at the Leslie Harris Centre of Regional Policy and Development at Memorial University of Newfoundland. It asked “What is rural in the 21st century?” The podcast was born out of a conversation with my friend Dr. Ryan Gibson after a Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation conference gathering on PEI. Rebecca Cohoe from Memorial’s Office of Public Engagement who grew up on a rural route named the show and later joined as a co-host and a producer. With the closure of the centre, the university stopped paying the hosting fees and the episodes disappeared from the podcast feed. I was able to salvage all of the episodes with the help of Barry Rooke from the National Community and Campus Radio Association and they are published here as an archive.
Dr. Ivan Emke says it's time to take care of the rural soul of Canada. Ivan is a rural scholar at Memorial University of Newfoundland based at the university's Corner Brook campus on the west coast of the island of Newfoundland. We talked about agriculture, rural stereotypes, the unsustainable nature of urban environments and the fact that neither of us could tell how long a group of academics could survive on their own.