Afterword: Medium America and the grounds of a transnational history of farm media

Abstract

This essay bookends the first special issue of essays dedicated to farm media and situates the issue’s contributions within a broader history of media, communications, and agricultural entanglement. The connections between these fields are grounded in what Peters calls “Medium America,” which names the spaces and ideologies most shaped by farming across the middle of the Americas to orient a critical transnational history of farm media. Land grant universities, farmworker movements, and rural communication infrastructure are just a few of the institutions that give shape to Medium America, as are the linguistic inheritances that stitch together these relationships, from broadcasting and academic fields to news feeds and data farms. The future of food and farming grows out of these histories.