The University of Kentucky has its own genius.

Dr. Luka Ashwood is a sociologist who studies rural identity and culture.

She is a 2024 MacArthur Fellow, a recipient of what many call the Genius grants.

Ashwood will receive $800,000 over the course of five years, no strings attached to continue her work and research.

Congrats to her.

Okay.

I think I'm going to answer this.

Oh, I was shocked at first.

First thing I said, are you serious?

Because I didn't believe them.

I think I thought it was a prank or something.

I am loca Ashwood, and I am a sociologist.

The best way to capture what I do is I work on issues of environmental injustice.

And also the opposite of that is achieving environmental justice for communities that have been targeted or had an undue burden of any sort of environmental contamination.

We know that most of the rural poor are in the southeast region of the United States, and so environmental injustice is also about the targeting of communities that have less money for the most toxic and hazardous industries.

So when I work with those communities, it's never just about giving them clean water, although that's also crucial or working towards clean air or addressing some sort of disparity that they care about, but also thinking about how the economic conditions gave rise to those disparities in the first place.

And how can we think about changing those economic conditions so there's more equality in rural communities.

One thing that I recently worked on were write to farm laws, which sound very innocuous and beautiful by name because who wouldn't want to have the right to farm?

We all should have the right to farm.

But these laws, in fact, have been used to enable the largest corporate agribusinesses and industry, all animal production facilities.

And in some cases they've even been co-opted by the timber industry as well as mining groups, to say, you know, if we move in next to you, you don't have the right to sue us for a nuisance in the event that we pollute your well water are in the event that we're contaminating the air.

So right to farm laws have turned into this tool to keep rural people from having proper recourse if things go wrong.

I think across the country, rural Americans are upset and worried about corporate power and lack of fair access to the marketplace.

The decline of farming in many communities, and that's a concern about corporate power.

That also shows that if we change and reform corporate law, we can give people more of a fair chance and help what people some people call Main Street America, but also rural America, smaller communities, because big is not always better.

Small is beautiful to.

And we agree.

Congrats again to Dr. Ashwood.