Seminar - March 2020
Male Farmer Distress and Suicides: The Subject Enmeshed in Political and Moral Economies, Ordinary Ethics and More-than-Human Encounters
Professor Lia Bryant, University of South Australia
**Please see updates posts: Due to concerns around COVID-19 this seminar has regrettably been cancelled**
For the Food Values Research Group's March 2020 seminar, we are pleased to welcome Professor Lia Bryant.
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.
When: Wednesday 18th March, 12-1pm
Where: Ira Raymond Room, Barr Smith Library, North Terrace Campus, University of Adelaide (click here for campus map)
Dr Lia Bryant is a Professor of Sociology and Social Work at the University of South Australia. She has published widely on topics including gender, sexuality, embodiment, work, and rurality, with a keen interest in qualitative methodologies. She has authored and edited several books, including "Social work in a globalised world" (2017) with Mona Livolts, "Water and rural communities: local politics, meaning and place" (2016) with Jodie George, "Critical and creative research methodologies in social work" (2015), and "Sexuality, rurality, and geography" (2013) with Andrew Gorman-Murray and Barbara Pini. She has also published in a wide range of journals and has several ongoing research projects across diverse research areas.