Photo by U.S. Department of Agriculture / Public Domain / Redactions added to original.
Redacted
Suicide, Big Ag, and Climate Crisis /
An Elegy for Farmers
Principal Investigator
Carla Barger, PhD Candidate, Program for Writers, Department of English, University of Illinois Chicago
Start Date
January 2024
Expected Completion Date
November 2024
Abstract
Redacted is an interdisciplinary public humanities project that elucidates the relationship between governmental policy, big agriculture, the climate crisis, and rising suicide rates among U.S. farmers. The project marries science and poetry by compiling, analyzing, and then visually presenting research and documents from these areas of interest, then using the data as ciphers and prompts to create poems. The work explores the chasm between erasure and embodiment / exploitation and humanity, and illustrates what data alone cannot—the visceral cost of environmental and human degradation.