Scholars have noted persistent high rates of agricultural health and safety incidents and the need to develop more effective interventions. Participatory research provides an avenue to broaden the prevailing research paradigms and approaches by allowing those most impacted to illuminate and work to solve those aspects of their lives. One such approach is photovoice, an emancipatory visual narrative approach. Yet, despite its broad appeal, photovoice can be hard to implement. In this article, we leverage our experience using photovoice for a (...) farm children safety project to describe and reflect on the ethical and methodological aspects broadly relevant to agricultural health and safety topics. We first contextualize the tensions of navigating between photovoice, the research ethics committees (RECs) regulatory frameworks, and competing views on visual representations in agriculture. We then discuss the sources of risks to participants and researchers, how we addressed these risks, and how these risks unfolded during the research phase of the photovoice activity. We conclude with three lessons we (re)learned: the importance of collaborating with RECs, the need to increase preparation to limit psychological risks to participants and researchers, and avenues to augment the emancipatory power of photovoice in a virtual environment. (shrink)

In recent years, the long-standing questions of why, how, and which farm families continue farming in the face of ongoing changes have increasingly been studied through the resilience lens. While this body of work is providing updated and novel insights, two limitations, a focus on macro-level challenges faced by the farm operation and a mismatch between the scale of challenges and resilience measures, likely limit our understanding of the factors at play. We use the example of medical economic vulnerability, a (...) micro-level challenge traditionally confined to the household sphere of the agri-family system, as a way to call attention to these limitations. Focusing on United States farm households, we assess: To what extent are they experiencing medical economic vulnerability when using objective and subjective outcome measures? Which demographic and farm characteristics are associated with experiencing medical economic vulnerability? What is the association between institutional arrangements and medical economic vulnerability? Our analysis of over 900 surveys coupled with a conceptual framework merging complementary insights from three bodies of literature revealed seemingly large differences in the prevalence of medical economic vulnerability across the objective and subjective measures with the subjective measure indicating a general sentiment of medical economic vulnerability in a majority of respondents. Conversely, limited variations were noted in who experiences medical vulnerability on the basis of demographic and farm characteristics, with stronger associations being connected to the households’ health insurance arrangements. We conclude with three implications of our findings for the farm resilience literature. (shrink)

In her 2020 Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society presidential address, Molly Anderson outlined three ways to push beyond boundaries imposed on us and by us to work towards addressing global food system and societal problems. In this response essay, I draw on my experiences and my perspectives as a pre-tenure rural sociologist who is not from around here to highlight how I attempt to push beyond boundaries in my own work and to discuss challenges associated with the feasibility of (...) some of Molly’s call. I also build on Molly’s call for boundary work including a broadening of international collaborations through increased engagement in cross-national comparative research, pivoting from interacting with global social movements to interacting with key stakeholders, and deepening of anti-discrimination work through the use of an intersectionality lens. Arguing that Molly’s call for action is bold but needed, I close my essay with a set of questions that I hope can contribute to larger discussions on how we can help one another push beyond boundaries to work towards more fair and sustainable food systems. (shrink)