« Build a statue and they will follow: Jennifer Sessions, ‘The Anxious Origins of a French Colonial Monument: The Duc d’Orléans in Algiers’, The Journal of the Western Society for French History’ 51, 8, 2025, pp. 72-79
Visual sovereignty in and against settler colonialism: Nicolas G. Rosenthal, Painting Native America: Indigenous Artists in the Twentieth Century, University of Nebraska Press, 2026 »

Stressed, very stressed settlers: Carly E. Nichols, ‘Stressor Source as a New Dimension of Emotional Political Ecologies: The Case of Corn Belt Farm Stress in the United States’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2025

11Dec25

Abstract: Emotional political ecology is a subfield that unpacks the ways power is negotiated via emotions in struggles around the environment. Although scholars have influentially outlined critical “dimensions” of emotion in environmental conflict, they pointedly leave their framework open to further theorization. This article thus proposes greater attention to the forces (i.e., stressors) that propel emotional responses in struggles over the environment, and the role of material or emotional coping tools that can disarm otherwise mobilizing emotions. I take the example of farm stress in the U.S. Midwest as a case to advance this point and focus on an underresearched group—Iowan conventional row-crop farmers. Conceptualizing stress as an affective and emotional bodily disposition, I demonstrate how stressors emanate from political economic structures, representational and discursive politics, and the materiality of everyday human–environment relations. I argue that although the materiality of weather causes in-the-moment anxiety, and discursive critiques of industrial agriculture cause frustration and anger, commodity farmers have established emotional and economic tools to cope with these stressors. These stressors are concomitant to more private feelings of grief, sadness, and confusion about how to navigate the changing political economy of agriculture, however, which respondents have less idea how to address. I conclude by drawing out how stressor–emotion–action responses can yield insights on how to grapple with farm stress and struggles over the environment more broadly.


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