Tim Slack

Professor Louisiana State University

  • Baton Rouge LA

Dr. Slack's is an expert on social, economic, and demographic change with a special focus on rural people and places.

Contact

Louisiana State University

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Areas of Expertise

Social Stratification & Poverty
Community & Environment
Social Demography
Rural Sociology

Biography

Tim Slack (Ph.D., Penn State) joined the LSU Department of Sociology in 2004. His scholarship focuses on the areas of social stratification, social demography, community and environment, and rural sociology. An overarching theme is thinking about space and place as axes of inequality. Prof. Slack has published widely and received funding to support his research program from sources including the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and U.S. Department of the Interior. Recent and ongoing research projects include studies of working poverty and other forms of underemployment; household livelihood strategies and participation in the informal economy (i.e., unrecorded work for cash and barter); and various aspects of regional inequality (e.g., place-based poverty dynamics, disaster vulnerability and resilience). Prof. Slack’s expertise has been sought for stories produced by major media outlets, such as The New York Times and The Advocate (Louisiana’s leading daily newspaper), as well as policy audiences, including the U.S. Congress and Louisiana State Legislature. He has served on the editorial boards of Rural Sociology, Demography, and Population Research and Policy Review. Prof. Slack’s work has been recognized with a number of honors, the LSU Rainmaker Award, LSU Alumni Association Faculty Excellence Award, and LSU Distinguished Faculty Award among them. He teaches a variety of courses at LSU, spanning introductory sociology to specialized graduate seminars.

His book, coauthored with Shannon M. Monnat, Rural and Small-Town America: Context, Composition, and Complexities (University of California Press, 2024), paints a social scientific portrait of rural America. The book examines social, economic, and demographic changes and how these changes present both problems and opportunities for rural communities. Throughout, empirical evidence is used to confront common myths and misunderstandings about rural people and places.

Research Focus

Social Stratification & Social Demography

Dr. Slack’s research focuses on social stratification, social demography, and rural sociology. He draws on secondary data (e.g., U.S. Census Bureau) and primary data collected from surveys, focus groups, and interviews to understand various dimensions of human wellbeing, including work and health, with a special focus on rural people and places.

Spotlight

5 min

LSU expert in social and economic issues: Rural America’s unique struggles affect how it votes

An expert in social and economic issues, Professor Slack explains the unique struggles facing rural communities—like changes in jobs, health concerns, and population shifts. In this Q&A, he clears up common misunderstandings about rural life, discusses the problems rural voters face, and explores how these issues may affect their votes in this important election. What is your area of expertise? I am a professor of sociology at LSU. My research coalesces around the areas of social stratification and social demography with an emphasis on geographic space and the rural-urban continuum as axes of difference. With my colleague Shannon Monnat (Syracuse University), I recently authored the book Rural and Small-Town America: Context, Composition, and Complexities, published by the University of California Press. What are the key socio-economic challenges facing rural voters in this election? Wow. Where to start? There are so many myths and misunderstandings about rural America. One is that “rural” is synonymous with farming. To be sure, agriculture is a vital industry in terms of sustenance and national security. But technological advances and farm consolidation—the shift from many smaller farms to fewer larger farms—means most rural Americans don’t have direct economic ties to agriculture anymore. The two largest sectors of employment in rural America today are services and manufacturing, respectively. A concern regarding the service sector is that it produces jobs that vary greatly in quality depending on people’s educational level; good professional jobs for the more educated and lower quality jobs—low wages, low hours, and few to any fringe benefits—for less educated folks. Those good professional jobs tend to be concentrated in urban areas (the emergence of remote work may reshape this in the future). Manufacturing employment, which has historically been the “good jobs” sector for less educated people, has been in steady decline in terms of its share of jobs for the past 50 years. While people sometimes think of plant and factory work as urban, it has provided a larger share of jobs and earnings in rural America for decades. Deindustrialization is causing real pain in rural America: it is one thing for a plant to shut down in a large and diversified metropolis, but quite another when it is the lone “good jobs” employer in town. Other big issues are the challenges posed by population aging and youth out-migration in rural America, as well as increasing racial and ethnic diversity. Another is the factors underlying the “rural mortality penalty”—that rural America has higher death rates and lower life expectancy than urban America. These are all pressing issues. What role will rural voters play in this close presidential race, and what may sway their vote? Rural voters will play a key role in this election, assuming the margins end up being as close as they have been in the last two presidential cycles. A persuasive working-class message and a sense that rural people and places are seen—that they aren’t just “flyover country”—will help. Given that the two leading candidates hail from New York City and San Francisco, both picked running mates with a rural and small-town backstory as a nod to that constituency. All of that said, the power of the rural vote should not be overstated. The contemporary U.S. is mainly an urban society, so the winning candidate will ultimately pull most of their votes from cities and suburbs. Can you discuss any recent research on how rural voting patterns have evolved over the last few election cycles? The short answer is that the rural vote has been steadily trending Republican for decades. The last presidential election in which voters in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan counties were essentially equal regarding party preferences was in 1976 when Jimmy Carter was elected. Since that time, the percentage of nonmetro votes for the Republican candidate has trended steadily upward. In 2020, roughly two-thirds of the nonmetro vote went to Donald Trump, more than 20 points higher than in metro counties. That said, rural voters are not a monolith. The flip side of the 2020 numbers above is that roughly 1 in 3 voters in nonmetro counties cast their ballot in the other direction. And rural places with majority Black, Latino, and Indigenous populations often vote in the Democratic column. Moreover, you have political legacies particular to certain places that matter—like the left-leaning Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota (today the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party or DFL) or the rural state of Vermont electing a socialist to the U.S. Senate (Bernie Sanders). So, there are notable deviations from the aggregate trend. “ The problems and prospects facing rural America in the 21st century matter for this nation. Personally, I would love to see a less ideological and more pragmatic politics emerge that puts that in focus. ” How do political campaigns target rural voters, and how effective do you think these strategies are? This is a bit outside my area of expertise, and I want to stay in my lane. But I will raise two issues. One is what the political scientist Katherine Cramer has called “rural consciousness”: a belief that rural areas are ignored by policymakers, that rural areas do not get their fair share of resources, and that rural folks have distinct values and lifestyles that are misunderstood and disrespected by city folks. The message from some quarters that rural people vote “against their own self-interest” or vote “the wrong way,” essentially that they are rubes, feeds into this. The other issue is that much of rural America is a local “news desert.” That is, there simply are no sources of comprehensive and credible local news. So, people rely on cable TV news or—if they have access to broadband—the internet. The result is that all news becomes national, even when those issues may have little bearing on local life. It used to be said that “all politics is local,” but in today’s media environment, that is increasingly untrue. Is there anything else you want to add? I would just emphasize that common myths and misunderstandings about rural America run deep. Rural America is not a paragon of stability, social and economic change abounds. And rural America is not a monolith, it is socially and regionally diverse. The problems and prospects facing rural America in the 21st century matter for this nation. Personally, I would love to see a less ideological and more pragmatic politics emerge that puts that in focus. Link to original article here. 

Tim Slack

Answers

What will rural communities look like when the family farm becomes rare, but food production is more high-tech than ever?
Tim Slack

This is a complicated story.In some respects, family farms remain the dominant farm type in the United States. For example, the USDA defines family farms as “any farm organized as a sole proprietorship, partnership, or family corporation. Family farms exclude farms organized as nonfamily corporations or cooperatives, as well as farms with hired managers.” By this definition, over 95 percent of the nation’s 2.2 million farms are family farms.But for many decades the trend in agriculture has been increasing consolidation toward a smaller number of large farms with greater productive capacity. According to the USDA, of the 2.2 million family farms, fewer than 200,000 large operations produce over 60 percent of all domestic food and fiber products sold. These are family farms, but they are also large, technology-intensive, sophisticated businesses.On the other hand, that idea that contemporary rural life is synonymous with agriculture is a myth and misunderstanding. The shift from many smaller farms to fewer larger farms means most rural Americans don’t have direct economic ties to agriculture anymore. Direct farm employment accounts for just over 1% of total U.S. employment and represents a minority of jobs even in the most sparsely populated counties in the country. The service and manufacturing sectors are the dominant jobs sectors in rural America today. Job losses in American manufacturing have been especially painful in many rural and small-town places. It is one thing for a plant to shut down in large diversified city, but quite another when it is the lone “good jobs” employer in town.

How did Hurricane Katrina change the rural landscape of Louisiana?
Tim Slack

Here’s what we know. While much of the media attention to Hurricane Katrina was focused on New Orleans—and not without reason, there was immense destruction and human suffering in the city—the story there was one of technological and infrastructural failure, like levee system breaches and overwhelmed pump systems. However, many of the places that took a direct hit from Katrina were rural and small-town communities along the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coast, places like Buras, Louisiana, and Pearlington, Mississippi, communities with fewer than 2,000 residents. In general, rural and small-town areas have less infrastructure and government capacity than cities do, exacerbating social vulnerability in that respect. More broadly, if you think about the land loss crisis in coastal Louisiana, most of the communities on the frontline are rural and small-town places, in parishes like Plaquemines, Lafourche, and Terrebonne. Barrier islands and marshes that used to function as “speed bumps” for storms are increasingly disappearing. This makes these communities more vulnerable to storms, as evidenced recently by the tremendous damage wrought by Hurricane Ida in 2021.One of the cumulative results of all these storms is the current property insurance crisis in South Louisiana. Low and moderate income folks increasingly can’t keep up with the rising cost of living on the coast. Older fixed income people not being able to insure their homes and younger people not being able to afford insurance to secure a mortgage sets the stage for depopulation absent innovative interventions.

Education

Penn State University

Ph.D.

Rural Sociology

2004

Penn State University

M.S.

Rural Sociology and Demography

2000

University of Wisconsin-Madison,

B.S.

Rural Sociology

1998

Accomplishments

Fred Buttel Outstanding Scholarly Achievement Award, Rural Sociological Society

2025

LSU Distinguished Faculty Award

2022

Media Appearances

Rural Health Resilience: A Four-Part Series On Healing The Other America

Forbes  online

2025-07-15

These older adults are often managing multiple chronic illnesses without access to home-based care, nearby pharmacies, or geriatric specialists. As Dr. Tim Slack of Louisiana State University puts it: “What we’re seeing is a slow erosion of the systems that support health—economic, medical, and civic."

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Rural Americans Are More Likely to Participate in the Informal Economy, Study Shows

The Daily Yonder  online

2025-06-11

Rural Americans are more likely to participate in the informal economy compared to their urban counterparts, according to a 2019 study published in Rural and Small-Town America, a new book written by rural sociologists Tim Slack and Shannon M. Monnat.

“People have been paying attention to rising economic precarity for a growing portion of people,” said Slack, who is a professor of sociology at Louisiana State University. “A lot of people are looking for compliments or substitutes for formal sector opportunities.”

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Donald Trump's Approval Rating Collapses With Rural Americans

Newsweek  online

2025-05-02

Tim Slack, a sociology professor at LSU, told Newsweek that he is "not especially surprised by these results.

"Lower income and working class folks, who make up a greater share of the population in rural America, are really hurting right now. And they have been for years," he said, explaining that economic recovery after 2008 was "slow and uneven," and many areas were still struggling when COVID hit, driving up prices.

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Articles

Deepwater Horizon oil spill exposures and long-term self-rated health effects among parents in coastal Louisiana

Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness

2023

Purpose
To assess whether exposure to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill (DHOS) was related to parents’ self-rated health over time.
Design
3 waves of panel data were drawn from the Gulf Coast Population Impact study (2014) and Resilient Children, Youth, and Communities study (2016, 2018).
Setting
Coastal Louisiana communities in high-impact DHOS areas.

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Disparate effects of BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill exposure on psychological resilience

Traumatology

2022

A growing body of research has demonstrated links between exposure to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill (DHOS) and negative consequences for well-being in the impacted region. We contribute to this literature by investigating the relationship between exposure to the DHOS (ie, physical and economic) and subsequent perceptions of the ability to cope with adverse events (ie, psychological resilience) among adults with children. Doing so advances prior research by (a) providing a direct test of psychological resilience (ie, the 10-item Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale) rather than relying on proxy measures and (b) improving on cross-sectional studies by using prospective cohort data to establish temporal ordering between spill exposure and psychological resilience.

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Bidirectional longitudinal associations of parent and child health following the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill

Population and Environment

2022

This study (1) assessed whether parent health mediated associations between exposures to the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill (BP-DHOS) and child health, and whether child health mediated associations between BP-DHOS exposures and parent health; and (2) assessed bidirectional longitudinal associations between parent health and child health following the BP-DHOS. The study used three waves of panel data (2014, 2016, and 2018) from South Louisiana communities highly impacted by the BP-DHOS. Parents with children (aged 4–18 at the time of the interview) were interviewed based on a probability sample of households.

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Affiliations

  • Population Association of America (PAA)
  • Rural Population Research Network (RPRN)
  • Rural Sociological Society (RSS)
  • Scholar Strategy Network (SSN)
  • Southern Demographic Association (SDA)

Research Grants

Equitable Resilience Assessment in a Changing Climate: A System-of-Systems Approach

Louisiana State University, Provost’s Fund for Innovation in Research

2024–2025

“Pelican Gulf Coast Carbon Removal

U.S. Department of Energy

2024–2025

Extreme Weather Events, Changing Communities, and Rural-Urban Disparities in Cardiovascular Health among Aging Adults

INRPHA & NIH National Institute on Aging

2022-2023

Social