Food Values Research Group seminar: "Male Farmer Distress and Suicides: The subject enmeshed in political and moral economies, ordinary ethics and more-than-human encounters"

The Food Values Research Group seminar series, now in its fifth year, brings together researchers from diverse fields with an interest in food production and consumption.

For our March seminar, we are proud to present:

Male Farmer Distress and Suicides: The subject enmeshed in political and moral economies, ordinary ethics and more-than-human encounters
Dr Lia Bryant
Professor of Sociology and Social Work, University of South Australia

Male farmer suicide is an ongoing concern in several countries including for example, Australia, the USA, Brazil, the UK, India and France. In Australia, the dominant discursive framework shaping male farmer suicide has been one of ‘drought stress’ constituted through a positivist empiricism and ‘psy’ discourses of mental health. The contours of this dominant framework have operated to limit other renderings of suicide. Using empirical data from Australia I present farmer distress as a multifaceted problem occurring in relation to intersections between male subjectivities, political and moral economies/communities and more-than-human relations.

I argue that political and moral economies operate to enact policies that individualise distress and actuarial risk in farming and also create ethical breaches within social and economic relations between farmers, corporations and the State. Alongside the workings of political and moral economies, community discourses of moral worth circulate through everyday social interaction and comprise an ‘ordinary ethics’ in rural communities shaping the contours of belonging. Further, farmers are deeply enmeshed within land/waterscapes and relations with animals and are impacted by destroyed or injured land/waterscapes and animals. These intersecting global and local political, economic, social, cultural and environmental conditions are corporeally experienced and felt as distress and suggest how suicide may emerge as a possibility for men in farming.