Current Projects:

• “We do it for other reasons. It’s conservation, it’s the right thing to do”: Centering farmer perspectives in agricultural policy reform for climate resilience.
  Forthcoming in the Journal of Community Practice, special issue: “Creating Social Responses to our Changing Environment
  This upcoming article examines how agricultural systems shape farmers’ ability to respond to the climate crisis. Drawing on policy analysis and qualitative interviews with farmers and mental health providers, the paper explores how market pressures, crop insurance structures, and rural social fragmentation can constrain conservation and climate resilience. The article argues that centering farmers’ lived experiences is essential for developing climate responses that are both socially just and environmentally sustainable.

• The importance and utility of arts-based methods in social work research: An example using climate change and farmer mental health.
  This project examines painting as an analytic tool in research on farmer mental health, climate change, and industrial agriculture. Centered on an autoethnographic painting created after time spent in a hog concentrated animal feeding operation, the paper explores how art-making helped surface the emotional realities of farmers, animals, and the broader systems that shape industrialized farming. In doing so, the project considers how arts-based analysis can deepen ecosocial and more-than-human approaches to social work research.

• Conceptualizing and measuring animal mental health: A scoping review.
  This scoping review, conducted with my colleague/friend who is a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, investigates the conceptual and epistemic boundaries of “animal mental health” in the scholarly literature. The project examines how different fields define, measure, or contest the term, with attention to the forms of knowledge that are privileged or excluded in discussions of animal well-being. In doing so, the review considers what animal mental health might offer to ecosocial work, One Health, and multispecies scholarship.

• Understanding farmworkers’ health needs: stakeholder perspectives
  This project focuses on the mental health and wellbeing of Georgia farmworkers, a population whose needs are often overlooked despite significant structural and social stressors. Working with colleagues in Mercer University’s Department of Public Health, we are interviewing community stakeholders to better understand farmworkers’ priority concerns, available resources, service gaps, and opportunities for future programming. The goal is to support the development of culturally responsive interventions grounded in farmworkers’ lived realities.