Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education Rural Sociology Seminar

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Dr. Green is the Director of the Southern Rural Development Center - one of four USDA regional rural development centers in the U.S - at Mississippi State University. He also serves as a professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics with an affiliated faculty position in the department of sociology.

This talk is rooted in the conceptualization of community and regional development as a combination of values and aspirations, the paths we build and take to achieve them, and our experiences along the way. Using this pathways approach, domains for development-focused social science research and practice include: identifying shared and divergent perspectives of development; collecting, analyzing, and utilizing publicly accessible data and information; and facilitating dialogue, discernment, and collaborative problem solving. Drawing from my professional experiences and extant frameworks and approaches, I synthesize ideas for integrating quantitative demographic and socioeconomic research with community-based, participatory, and action-oriented methods. I call for work to build capacity for people and organizations to measure what they value, attend to needs/assets and possible development pathways, monitor and evaluate development processes and outcomes, and engage their wider publics for greater data utilization. Taken together, these are important for leaders working at the intersections of development and data in the digital age.