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California’s Central Valley is arguably the most productive agricultural region in the world. Despite making up only 1% of all farmland in the United States, it produces 250 different crops that make up a quarter of all food consumed in the U.S., including close to half of all fruit, nuts, and table foods. The map included below shows the variety and intensity of this kind of cultivation. This level of agricultural production has been made possible by the dominance of industrial agriculture interests at all levels of government, resulting in one of the most physically altered landscapes in the world. These alterations focused in large part on water, the biggest limiting factor for industrial agriculture in a region technically classified as a desert. Over the course of the 20th century, the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi–Tulare Lake–was drained to make more land available, the Central Valley Project and State Water Project built thousands of miles of canals and tens of dams to control the supply of water for irrigation, and massive groundwater aquifers were pumped nearly dry during drought years. These transformations were accomplished through the utilization of rhetoric that emphasizes the centrality of the farmer identity to the American political imaginary (despite the massive distance between Californian industrial agriculture and the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal) and the unique importance of providing the nation’s food. This kind of exceptionalism has characterized agriculture across the United States since its inception and has repeatedly produced other forms of social injustice (e.g., the exclusion of agricultural laborers from U.S. labor protections) that compound the hazardous effects of its environmental injustices.

Source

Vo, Katie, Taranjot Bhari and Margaret Tebbe. 2023. Industrial Agriculture in California's Central Valley. In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

California’s Central Valley is arguably the most productive agricultural region in the world. Despite making up only 1% of all farmland in the United States, it produces 250 different crops that make up a quarter of all food consumed in the U.S., including close to half of all fruit, nuts, and table foods. The map included below shows the variety and intensity of this kind of cultivation. This level of agricultural production has been made possible by the dominance of industrial agriculture interests at all levels of government, resulting in one of the most physically altered landscapes in the world. These alterations focused in large part on water, the biggest limiting factor for industrial agriculture in a region technically classified as a desert. Over the course of the 20th century, the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi–Tulare Lake–was drained to make more land available, the Central Valley Project and State Water Project built thousands of miles of canals and tens of dams to control the supply of water for irrigation, and massive groundwater aquifers were pumped nearly dry during drought years. These transformations were accomplished through the utilization of rhetoric that emphasizes the centrality of the farmer identity to the American political imaginary (despite the massive distance between Californian industrial agriculture and the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal) and the unique importance of providing the nation’s food. This kind of exceptionalism has characterized agriculture across the United States since its inception and has repeatedly produced other forms of social injustice (e.g., the exclusion of agricultural laborers from U.S. labor protections) that compound the hazardous effects of its environmental injustices.

Vo, Katie, Taranjot Bhari and Margaret Tebbe. 2023. "Industrial Agriculture in California's Central Valley." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

1. Songs as artifacts, 

2. Faith in God enables their forgiveness: how does the belief in God and in Amis ancestor co-exist? (阿美人有祖靈概念嗎?)

3. 遷徙的過程: 從美山，新莊到新竹，從打漁到打零工，這一路轉換對阿嬤個人，她的家庭以及部落代表著什麼?以及這段小歷史如何被鑲嵌在大歷史的脈絡中?

Emily Goldmann is a PhD and MPH (Master of Public Health) at the College of Global Public Health. She focuses on environmental and social causes of mental health and their consequences. While she doesn't focus on disasters, her studies intersect with those in which we are interested in: Global Health and causes of mental health disorders.

Sandro Galea is a physician and epidemiologist at Boston School of Public Health. He has a long list of other positions of research at other colleges as well. He focuses on how the social aspects of a community create mental disorders, particularly urban communities where mood-anxiety and substance abuse disorders are common. He has a particular focus also upon mass-trauma and disasters and how they affect the mental health of the world long term, such as 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina. He studies precisely what is relevant to the DSTS Network in these cases, where he looks at the mental health consequences instead of the physical consequences of these disasters.

The understanding of disasters and their relation to global mental health, both to those who suffered directly from then and to those who were part of the greater community of those who suffered, is constantly evolving. Analyzation of past research and the current methods of study allow the global community to effectively understand and treat mental health on a large scale.

"At this point, the burden of mental disorders after disasters has been well documented, and interest in the course of trajectory of psychological symptoms following disasters is growing."

"Persons who live in a community where a disaster hsa occured may differ in their degree of exposure in the event. They may be affected directly, being present at the disaster site, or indirectly, having loved ones present at the disaster site or seeing images of the disaster in the media."

"Ongoing stressors such as job loss, property damage, marital stress, physical health conditions related to the disaster, and displacement are often experienced by those affected by the disaster... Low levels of and reductions in social support are also associated iwth post-disaster psychological symptoms."

The authors reference main research articles and books written about the subject from the past. 

They also reference epidemiological and sociological studies in supporting their mental health arguements. 

Other health references, such as the DSM and Indexes are referenced in the article. 

The authors used their knowledge of the subject and an extensive amount of articles and publications they referenced in order to create a summary of the subject and where it is moving toward.

The article talks about emergency responders and how debriefing was critical in maintaining mental health for them and other sufferers of trauma.

According to google scholar this article has been cited 45 times. Some articles include:

"Medically unexplained physical symptoms in the aftermath of disasters"

"Postdisaster health effects..."

"Mental and social health in disasters..."