A Rural Agrarian Reckoning Multigenerational Farmers Seeking to Repair Soil, Agriculture, and Rural

Speaker: Sydney Giacalone, A17, PhD student at Brown University
Sydney Giacalone's research studies multigenerational farmers and ranchers across the US who are transitioning away from conventional practices towards environmentally and social repairing approaches. This experience often involves questioning past education and internalized ideologies, learning to collaborate with nonhuman life to repair degraded ecologies, making intentional breaks from family and institutions, and joining networks to align with other people and causes. In the current US climate, these activities are often contentious within their rural communities and are intertwined with debates around the environment, land, gender, race, and class. As farmers’ transitions disrupt hierarchies foundational to the American family farm, how are familial, community, and ecological relationships broken, remade, or formed anew? This lecture will consider specifically how farmers are questioning and molding rural environments through these reparative efforts: what does American ruralness mean, who does it include, and why is it a landscape worth (or worthy of) changing?
This lecture is sponsored by Environmental Studies in collaboration with the Department of Anthropology. To sign up for more talks, visit the link: as.tufts.edu/e....
Sydney Giacalone, A17, is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at Brown University. Her work bridges environmental anthropology, political ecology, and rural studies. Giacalone received an undergraduate degree in Anthropology and Environmental Studies with a focus in Food Systems and the Environment from Tufts University, and a masters degree in Anthropology from Brown University. Her current multi-sited research theorizes alongside reckoning U.S. farmers: rural multigenerational agrarians engaged in the social, political, and ecological work of learning about and attending to their roles in their communities-human and nonhuman, past, present, and future. This research responds to calls within the social sciences for critical, non-reductive research on rural America, the concept of culpability, and dismantling systems of class, race, and species-based violence. Outside of her research, Giacalone is a graduate affiliate of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, a graduate student coordinator for the Rural Women’s Studies Association, and a co-editor of Engagement, the online journal for the Anthropology and Environment Society.