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Kansas, Missouri farmers avoid discussing climate change regardless of opinions, study finds
LAWRENCE — Farmers, who are on the front lines of climate change, avoid talking about the topic with their neighbors, community members, elected officials and even their own families because of potential conflict and harm to their livelihood, new research from the University of Kansas has found.
KU faculty awarded AAI Arts & Humanities Grant to expand art-based aging project
LAWRENCE — “Untold Stories of Aging in Action – Revealed and Traveled,” a project to create and document the influence of an art-based intervention among communities of older adults and intergenerational audiences, has been awarded university grant funding to expand its reach, bringing the art collection to a wider audience through a traveling exhibition set to begin in summer 2025. The pieces will be brought to communities of older adults where KU social welfare and visual art students will facilitate discussions about the pieces with community residents and attendees, who themselves can contribute to the art project.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected]
Kansas, Missouri farmers avoid discussing climate change regardless of opinions, study finds
LAWRENCE — We have all avoided having conversations if the topic is controversial or may lead to an argument. Farmers, who are on the front lines of climate change, avoid talking about it with their neighbors, community members, elected officials and even their own families because of potential conflict and harm to their livelihood, new research from the University of Kansas has found.
Researchers conducted interviews with more than 20 farmers in Kansas and Missouri to understand their communication about climate change. Results showed respondents had a range of views on climate change from being convinced of its effects and taking action in their farming operations to skepticism — but all avoided discussing it to varying extents.
“People were worried about a variety of reactions. Some said they couldn’t even talk about it with their families because they would give them a weird look if they brought it up,” said Hong Tien Vu, associate professor of journalism & mass communications at KU and lead author of the study. “That was a low-level worry, but others said they had heard people laughing at them or were concerned about their neighbors not working with them if they had different opinions.”
The study was born from research Vu and students started during the COVID-19 pandemic. The group received private donor funding to study local climate change effects. Students interviewed scientists on campus and farmers in surrounding communities about climate change, their views on it and how it affects them. Farmers were reluctant to discuss the topic on camera.
“When we talk about climate change, we tend to look at broad effects like sea level rise. It can be difficult for people to find relevance in topics like that in their lives. We wanted to focus on factors that relate to people’s lives here in Kansas,” Vu said. “We wanted to interview farmers specifically because they are on the front lines of climate change impacts, both in terms of contributing to it through factors like emissions and feeling the effects of it.”
Given farmers’ reluctance to discuss the topic on camera, researchers decided to conduct interviews in which they could guarantee anonymity for respondents. Farmers then discussed their opinions on the topic, how it affects their lives and work, and why they avoid discussing it.
The researchers examined the topic through the lens of spiral of silence theory, which posits that when discussing controversial topics, people judge the prevailing opinion of others before deciding whether to speak. If they feel they are in the minority, people will often choose not to discuss a topic, which can have long-term ramifications, including silencing people and exacerbating problems that people choose not to address.
The results confirmed the prevalence of a spiral of silence among Kansas and Missouri farmers. The respondents were both men and women, ranging in age from their 20s to 70s. When asked their thoughts on climate change, responses ranged from believing it is real, scientifically proven and having effects now, to being skeptical both of its prevalence and whether it is caused by humans. But across the board, respondents indicated they generally avoid discussing the topic.
The farmers gave a range of reasons why they avoid it. Many simply did not want a conflict that could result in violence or an argument with neighbors or community members. Some feared it could damage their business, as neighbors might be less likely to work with them and share equipment or people might give them a negative online review and tell people not to buy their products at farmers’ markets and other locales if they disagreed with their views.
Farmers said they also tried to gauge a person’s opinions based on interpersonal cues before deciding whether to discuss climate change. For example, the type of vehicle a person drives, whether a large pickup or hybrid car, can provide clues about their opinions on the matter.
Spiral of silence theory holds that people traditionally used news media to gauge political opinion on a potentially controversial topic. However, respondents in the study indicated they felt news media only politicized the topic and therefore was not a trustworthy way of determining how people felt. Instead, many turned to social media where they could see if people posted on the topic or to find others to discuss it with, without fear of arguments or contentious conversations.
“The algorithm can allow you to choose who to talk to or who to exclude,” Vu said of social media. “People also often feel masked on social media. To me, that is a way of losing conversations and can give you a false sense of prevalence of opinions by eliminating cross examples.”
The study, co-written with Nhung Nguyen, lecturer; Nazra Izhar, doctoral candidate; and Vaibhav Diwanji, assistant professor of journalism and mass communications, all at KU, was published in the journal Environmental Communication.
When asked how they deal with the effects of climate change, several farmers reported taking measures such as switching to organic methods, fallowing fields to counter overuse of land and seeking information on more sustainable practices. Several also reported feeling isolated in general and given that they felt they could not discuss climate change, took to journaling as a way to process their thoughts.
Vu and colleagues, who have studied how climate change is viewed and reported globally, said understanding how the issue is viewed and discussed in more local settings is also important because people need to work together in day-to-day operations like farming as well as for policy solutions. If pressing issues are not discussed, it can negatively affect how they are dealt with on interpersonal levels and at local levels of government, they argue.
As part of the larger research project, the group plans to use journalistic storytelling techniques to document how people are dealing with climate change locally and their opinions on the topic. They also plan to test the effects of different content elements such as psychological distance and modalities like text, video, podcast or virtual reality on public perceptions of and behaviors toward sustainability.
“In our conversations with farmers, we found they often felt excluded from other conversations on climate change,” Vu said. “It felt like they were picking their battles with everyone, because they are often blamed for things like emissions, while working on adjusting their farming practices for mitigation and adaptation purpose. We think not talking about climate change is a serious issue.”
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Contact: Chance Dibben, Achievement & Assessment Institute, [email protected]
KU faculty awarded AAI Arts & Humanities Grant to expand art-based aging project
LAWRENCE — The Achievement & Assessment Institute (AAI) at the University of Kansas has awarded the 2024 AAI Art & Humanities Grant to Sarah Jen, associate professor in the School of Social Welfare, and Liz Langdon, a lecturer in the Department of Visual Art, for their project, “Untold Stories of Aging in Action – Revealed and Traveled.” The project’s aim is to create and document the influence of an art-based intervention among communities of older adults and intergenerational audiences.
“Untold Stories of Aging in Action – Revealed and Traveled” was born out of a 2021 project by KU social work students seeking to illuminate the experiences of older adults and their caregivers through art and conversation. Students collected and displayed artwork from more than 30 artists that captured stories of aging, and the pieces were displayed in an exhibition hosted in the KU Commons in April 2022.
“Artists were able to use their artwork to start important conversations with their loved ones. Displaying their work also allowed them to leave a legacy, tell their stories to and be remembered by a larger audience,” Jen said.
Since then, the online digital archive of submissions from KU students and other community members has continued to grow. “Untold Stories of Aging in Action – Revealed and Traveled” will be an evolution of the original project and will bring the art collection to a wider audience through a traveling exhibition.
The pieces, ranging from poetry to sculptures, will be brought to communities of older adults where students from the KU School of Social Welfare and the visual art department will facilitate discussions about the pieces with community residents and attendees. KU art education students will be leading the art criticism portion of discussions, while the social work students will facilitate the psycho-socio-emotional meaning-making portion.
“Art is a vehicle for conversation, and we think the discussions are going to be very rich as we work in these communities,” Langdon said. “It’s not all about the quality of the artwork necessarily. It’s really about the process, the meaning making, and the building of connections through looking at and discussing art.”
Attendees will also be able to participate in their own interactive art creation and meaning-making process by contributing to collective art installations. Their reflections and reactions to the exhibition will be recorded and documented for future grant submissions to reproduce this creative intervention on a wider scale. A larger collection of pieces and the art installations created by older adults will also be shared at an exhibition open to the broader community at the end of the project.
“Our audience for the original exhibition was really intergenerational and reached a wide range of ages, so I am really looking forward to having specifically an older adult audience and seeing how older adults respond to the artwork,” Jen said. “I think we know more about how younger people and an intergenerational group has responded to it so far, but I’m excited about the potential of getting older adult voices out there as well and being able to share that with a wider audience.”
Jen and Langdon said that they want to provide a space for older adults to think about their next chapters, allowing them to break away from societal expectations of what late life typically looks like.
“There’s a lot of research that says that when folks can imagine what they want for their futures, they’re more planful in making it happen, but we don’t often give older adults the experience to think of what comes next,” Jen said. “I think societally we tend to think of later life as like this one homogenous experience where once you’re 65 or older, it’s all the same after that. But it can be inspiring for people who are in their 70s and 80s to think about what they still want out of their lives.”
The purpose of the AAI Arts & Humanities Grant is to foster deeper ties between the arts and humanities and the education and social sciences within which most of AAI’s work is focused. “Untold Stories of Aging in Action” bridges these two fields in a creative and resonant way that engages the community.
“We’ve had this dream of bringing together students from social work with students from art education for a while, and this felt like a really nice way to do that. Art brings up emotions, and it triggers things, and students in the social work field know what to do with that,” Jen said. “Art students will ask audience members to interpret and engage with the art, and then the social work students pick up that thread and ask, ‘What do you do with that? What comes next?’ So, I think those two groups of students will really balance each other well.”
Langdon said that receiving the AAI Arts & Humanities grant is encouraging in part because it shows that the arts are valued at KU.
“The joy that comes from engaging with art can be a really positive and transformational experience for people. I am excited that we will be able to make those connections and that AAI has recognized that this work is important,” Langdon said.
AAI Operating Officer Jackie Counts highlighted the project’s effects on reshaping perceptions of aging.
“This project powerfully illustrates how art can transform our understanding of aging,” Counts said. “By uniting social work and art education, Jen and Langdon’s work amplifies the diverse stories of older adults and encourages them to reimagine their futures. At AAI, we champion interdisciplinary collaborations that bridge the humanities and social sciences while fostering meaningful community connections.”
The “Untold Stories of Aging in Action – Revealed and Traveled” traveling exhibition will begin in summer 2025. More information regarding the project will be made available in the coming months.
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