Shelby O'Neill graduated from Colby College in 2015 with a degree in
government. His senior honors thesis examined the ways in which socioeconomic
inequality shaped political involvement in a small town in Maine. While in
Maine, he developed a deep interest in farming and has spent most of the past
three years doing pick, warehouse, and tractor work with crews of migrant
farmworkers in California and Minnesota. He hopes to ethnographically explore
the experiences of farmers and farmworkers in the US and how those
experiences are shaped by broader social, political, economic, and cultural
forces. In so doing, he wants to better understand the core features of rural
identity and the problems and challenges farming communities face.