Who Gets to Define Rural Communities?

In our first episode, we ask: Who gets to shape the stories that define rural communities?

Welcome to Rural Narratives, a new podcast about public health in North Carolina’s rural communities. In this series, storytelling isn’t just about the news — it’s a way to listen, learn, and understand how meaning is made.

We speak with:

• Dee Davis, President of the Center for Rural Strategies

• Makani Themba, Chief Strategist of Higher Ground Change Strategies

• Mik Moore, CEO of Moore + Associates

Together, they explore how dominant narratives take shape, how culture influences politics, and why trust in public health begins with who controls the story.

Transcript

In our first episode, we ask: Who gets to shape the stories that define rural communities?

DEE DAVIS: What's important is that you somehow transcend that place of ‘I'm tired of being picked on’ to a place where you can demonstrate a reason to go forward, a reason that it matters, a reason that your community should have a chip in the game and should have their stories elevated. You know, it can't just be fighting against these ghosts.

You gotta, you gotta go somewhere else. 

LAYNA HONG: Welcome to Rural Narratives. 

In rural North Carolina, public health is built on trust. This decides who gets heard, who’s invited in, and who helps shape the systems we depend on. 

These factors can determine whether a hospital stays open, whether clean water is safe to drink, or whether families feel safe walking into their local health department.

In some towns, that conversation happens in a county commission meeting with folding chairs and a crackling microphone. 

In others, it happens at a church potluck or around a kitchen table.

I’m Layna Hong.

Welcome to our first episode.

North Carolina has the country’s second largest rural population. These communities are fundamental to our state’s past, present and future. 

But too often, rural places are talked about from the outside. They’re reduced to statistics, stereotypes or symbols.

And when a place becomes a symbol, the people who live there can lose their voice in shaping the systems meant to serve them.

Turn on the news, and you’ll see maps and headlines that flatten entire regions into a single color. A single issue. A single story. 

And the story goes like this: There’s a divide between people who live in cities and people who don’t. These two groups couldn’t be more different…economically, culturally, politically, you name it. 

And it seems like the gap gets wider and wider each passing day. 

 But at Rural Narratives, we’re challenging that perspective. 

What if the real question isn’t who rural communities vote for, but who gets to define them in the first place?. We’re asking the question of who has decided that this should  be the narrative. 

In this episode, we’re unpacking how dominant narratives take shape, their impacts and how we can begin to change them through storytelling. 

We’ll hear from three people who’ve spent years thinking about culture, story, and power.

Mik Moore works at the intersection of comedy and narrative in New York City.

Dee Davis has spent decades redefining how rural communities are portrayed from his home in Kentucky.

And Makani Themba is a longtime organizer and social justice advocate now based in Mississippi. She’s spent years helping people redefine the dominant narratives around their communities. 

Mik Moore runs a creative agency in New York City that works on narrative change through comedy and culture.

MIK MOORE: I tend to think of culture and narrative as like cousins.

HONG: He says most of us don’t encounter ideas first through politics, but rather, through culture.

MOORE: People spend a very small amount of their time in politics, but they spend the bulk of their time in culture, right? So you wake up in the morning, you listen to music, you listen to a podcast, you go to a movie, you watch a TV show, right? You’re constantly in spaces where you’re engaging with different cultural products. 

HONG: Over time, these stories shape what we consider normal and not. The injustices we should be outraged by and the issues we believe are worth fighting for. 

MOORE: There’s a widely repeated saying that politics is downstream of culture.

HONG: Often before something is introduced as law, he says it begins as a story.

He points to sitcoms, which regularly feature plotlines that deal with real life issues, like marriage equality and immigration. 

MOORE: It’s sort of introducing communities that have been outside of the dominant culture to have a gateway into people’s homes, right?

HONG: Moore says you usually can’t change people’s minds with just facts and data alone. 

Sometimes it does take a sitcom, a song, or a shared love of a band. 

MOORE: That can create a relationship based on mutuality that can help bridge what are some not insignificant cultural and political divides, right?

HONG: And if politics is downstream of culture, then trust is downstream of story.

So that leads us to the stories being told in the mainstream about rural communities. 

Rural America has often been treated less as a place and more like a shorthand that sows anger, political division or illustrates societal decline.

And the people who live there no longer control what’s being said about their hometowns. 

This narrative impacts not only how outsiders see rural America, but also how rural communities see themselves. 

So if we’re going to talk about trust and public health in rural communities, we first have to ask: Who’s been telling the story? And who hasn’t?

That’s a question Dee Davis has been working on for decades…

He runs the Center for Rural Strategies, an organization that works to change how rural America is understood and talked about.

Davis began his career in the early 1970s at Appalshop in eastern Kentucky. It’s a cultural center devoted to telling Appalachian stories. 

Since then, he has spent decades building rural media from his home in Whitesburg with the center.

DAVIS: What we try to do is build smarter, greener, more inclusive rural communities.

HONG: One of the first big campaigns that Davis and the Center for Rural Strategies launched was in 2003. They were trying to stop CBS Television from producing a show called "The Real Beverly Hillbillies."

DAVIS: It was mostly just a reality show humiliating people for being poor and being rural.

HONG: After months of national newspaper ads, emails, faxes, press coverage, meetings and even protests, CBS dropped the proposed series. 

DAVIS: We had a hundred million newspaper impressions. It was a huge national issue and, and people were writing from rural Texas, soldiers who felt put down because they came from the country and people from the Dakotas, all over, not just the south and not just the mountains. But it was important for them to push back against those people who’d laughed at them. 

HONG: Davis himself grew up in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. 

DAVIS: I think for a lot of us who grew up, we kind of felt like we were tired of folks laughing at hillbillies.

HONG: “The Real Beverly Hillbillies,” while it never launched, is just one example of how the mainstream culture feels about rural people. 

And likewise, has informed how rural communities feel about the dominant mainstream culture. 

DAVIS: Everybody in this country thinks someone's putting them down. Every place everybody thinks somebody's laughing at 'em, looking down. Even billionaires think they're being discriminated against.

HONG: But Davis says it’s important to move beyond that way of thinking and move forward.

DAVIS: What's important is that you somehow transcend that place of ‘I'm tired of being picked on’ to a place where you can demonstrate a reason to go forward, a reason that it matters, a reason that your community should have a chip in the game and should have their stories elevated. You know, it can't just be fighting against these ghosts.

You gotta, you gotta go somewhere else. 

HONG: And he believes that storytelling is the key to what we need.

DAVIS: The news is temporal and the times would suggest what's needed is something that's biblical…You know, something that will stand when the world's on fire.

HONG: So what does it mean to build a narrative that lasts?

This is what I asked Makani Themba, a longtime community organizer and social justice innovator. 

MAKANI THEMBA: when we think about narrative change, we're not only thinking about what we're saying, quote unquote, or what we're conveying, quote unquote, whether visually, verbally, or the other ways.

HONG: She’s now based in Mississippi, but she founded and used to run The Praxis Project, a nonprofit organization helping communities use media and policy advocacy to advance health justice. 

She says that narrative change isn’t as simple as just saying things and expecting people to change their mind.

THEMBA: I think the first step is how do we help people set a different compass.

HONG: Our compass is how we make decisions and make sense of the world. 

And at this moment, she says that many people are being motivated by their fear and anxiety. 

THEMBA: Well if someone tells me to be afraid of this, I'm going to be afraid because I want to make sure that I don't meet any harm. And the only way to not meet harm is to be fearful, keep my guard up and make sure that nothing comes at me that can harm me or mine.

HONG: Fear of not being able to afford food. Of losing your job. Of being unable to protect your family. Those are all powerful narratives being used to sway public opinion and perspectives on important political issues.

If fear becomes the compass, trust becomes harder to build.

THEMBA: You tell a story, you organize information into a story. And it’s not like people are just sponges. They’re gonna take that and hear it a particular kind of way.

HONG: It’s not only about how you deliver information, but considering how people receive it.

THEMBA: It’s really about, how do we work together to create systems of storytelling and narrative and understanding and sense making.

HONG: It’s partially recognizing that everyone lives by their own truths shaped by their experiences and environment.

THEMBA: Now do I believe there are things that are true for me? Absolutely. So if I say to you that I think love is the animating force of the universe and it’s the only true thing that there is. It’s what makes us who we are when we are our true selves — you know, that’s what I think. I personally think that’s truth with a capital T.

Can I prove that? In my own mind, I can. I can quote things.

But the truth is constantly being negotiated.

HONG: And in communities trying to build trust in public health systems, that negotiation matters.

For Dee Davis, that doesn’t start in theory. It starts in a relationship.

DAVIS: You just gotta trust them and you gotta show that there's some shelf life in what you say. You gotta be honest brokers even when what you're telling people is not what they want to hear.

HONG: And when you reorient your compass to make room for other people’s realities…

DAVIS: To be in the presence of great storytellers, to be in the presence of old women breaking beans, to be in the presence of old guys at the diner eating breakfast. Those are the moments we're given that let us glimpse something beyond our daily routine.

HONG: In rural North Carolina, public health isn’t just something delivered. It’s something communities build together and become the shared structures that keep us safe and well.

I’m Layna Hong. Thanks for listening to Rural Narratives.