As a PhD student at Stanford, I often get confused looks from colleagues when I say I’m “working at the Farm,” which is a nickname for Stanford University itself (that I personally don’t use, as I find it quite cheesy). I mean Stanford’s Educational Farm, which is where, for the past few years, I’ve been learning how to grow and process fibers from plants as part of my dissertation research on the turn-of-the-twentieth century history of Korean indentured labor trafficking to the agave fiber plantations of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.  (read more...)