Well-being for whom and at whose expense: COVID-19 through the lens of moral geographies in two rural Colorado communities

This chapter reflects on questions that all-too-often go unasked in quality of life research. Questions like, ‘Are higher levels of well-being always a good thing?' and ‘Are there circumstances where high levels of well-being in a given community could be seen as a warning sign rather than a cause for celebration?' To think through these questions, I examine a dataset drawn from two rural communities in Colorado (US). The project began in late 2019 and concluded in the summer of 2020, which means it draws from pre-and post-outbreak (COVID-19) data. One community is located on the rural eastern plains of the state, while the other is located in the Rocky Mountains within a frontier county –‘frontier' is a subset of the ‘rural' classification to refer to US counties with population densities of six or fewer persons per square mile. These communities also differed in terms of their demographic compositions, with one being overwhelming white while the other had recently seen a considerable influx of immigrants. The research points to how ‘rural' and ‘rural well-being' cannot be understood monolithically, while also proving they can be good to think about from the perspective of troubling concepts like happiness and satisfaction. © Manchester University Press 2022.

Digital agriculture killjoy: happy objects and cruel quests for the good life. (Special Issue: Landscapes of support: farmer wellbeing and rural resilience through and beyond crises.)

This article brings together phenomena not often connected in the rural studies cannon to show an underlying relationality connecting digital agriculture, conceptions of the good life and pursuits of happiness. Drawing from the scholarship of Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant, Agriculture 4.0 technologies are described as 'cruel' happiness pointers. These platforms are shown to direct actors towards happiness while potentially accelerating the very conditions that produced the problems they are promising to solve. Highlighting conceptions of the good life that are fluid, contested and multiple, which have connections to sayings and doings associated with these platforms, the analysis makes visible norms and values animating the so-called digital revolution. At the same time, the article interrogates what these changing affective politics means for the future of farming and farm-based identities, at least in Western countries. The data analysed, from individuals who had adopted smart farming applications in the US, were collected from focus groups and personal interviews, the latter conducted pre (2019) and post coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak (2020 and 2021).

Farming wellbeing through and beyond COVID-19: Stressors, gender differences and landscapes of support

Although there has been a recent surge in research on drivers of poor farmer wellbeing and mental health, there is still a limited understanding of the state of wellbeing in farming communities around the world and how it can be best supported. This special issue seeks to extend our knowledge of how a combination of different stressors can challenge the wellbeing of farmers, farming families and farm workers, as well as how negative impacts can be unevenly distributed between different individuals. We advance the state of the art in research on farmer wellbeing, illustrating how social, economic and environmental policy drivers combine to create multiple points of stress, which are experienced differently by different individuals (e.g., age, gender). We move beyond an exploration of stressors towards a consideration of how landscapes of support for farmer wellbeing, and packages of support interventions, can improve the social resilience of farming communities. To be effective, these landscapes of support need to be accessible, well-funded, joined-up, and adaptable to evolving crises. This special issue explores farmer wellbeing in the context of global agricultural transitions, which are demanding new ways of farming (e.g., digitalisation, net zero, economic restructuring), and in light of shock events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, in four countries—Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and the US. In exploring the impacts of future shock events and agricultural transitions on wellbeing, the issue concludes with a call to move beyond broad compilations of stressors and interventions and towards nuanced investigations of why and how poor farmer wellbeing occurs and how it can be best supported in specific contexts. The research from these four countries has wide relevance across European countries (similarity in farming systems, noting some differences), but a key message from the issue is that stressors on farmer wellbeing can be highly context-dependent according to place-based social, environmental, economic and political issues. © 2023 The Authors. Sociologia Ruralis published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Society for Rural Sociology.

Just-in-case transitions and the pursuit of resilient food systems: enumerative politics and what it means to make care count

This paper represents one of the first critical social science interrogations of an agrifood just-in-case transition. The just-in-case transition speaks to a philosophy that values building buffers and flexibility into longer value chains to make them more resilient to shocks, which stands in contrast to the just-in-time philosophy with its emphasis on long, specialized, and often inflexible networks. Influenced by COVID-related disruptions and climate change induced uncertainties, the just-in-case transition examined here centers on the heightened interest in vertical farm-anchored supply chains. Interviewing actors responsible for promoting vertical farm-anchored local supply chains in the US and Canada, I attempt to sketch out how these spaces, infrastructures, and practices care. Put differently, as understood through a feminist ethics of care, whom and what are cared for and how is care practiced in these just-in-case transitions and why? Enumerative politics was observed in the data-the idea that we can make care count. Practices and discourses linked to infrastructural/supply chain transitions are highlighted that result in care being narrowly conceived as a technical or transactional matter. The paper concludes reflecting on what it means to afford just-in-case agrifood transitions animated by matters of care that hold greater emancipatory potentials.