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Short abstract:

The management of plant diseases makes salient ontological and epistemological assymetries in technoscience. An STS approach based on the concept of infrastructure can help to unveil such assymetries, so the paper shows how this concept can be transformed for decolonial practices within STS.

Long abstract:

Due to the increasing research on agrifood systems vulnerabilities, a major area that is gaining attention from STS and social sciences researchers is the management of plant diseases. This is a pressing issue, since currently plant diseases have the potential of turning into epidemics which could affect crops and threaten the global access of people to food. However, there are persistent epistemological and ontological asymmetries in the technoscience interventions to mitigate the impact of plant diseases. The potato is a good exemplar of this situation, because currently both natural and social scientists have tried to anticipate and manage the impact of future diseases that could affect this key crop in the northern Andes in South America.

This paper proposes a decolonial approach to attend to the intellectual and practical asymmetries involved in the management and investigation of responses to potato plant diseases. Taking as departure point the concept of “infrastructure”, which is conventionally defined in STS research as the situated arrangements of people, knowledge and technologies that shape specific forms of action, I show what decolonization could mean for STS research of infrastructures and plant diseases management. For doing so, I draw on Latin American scholarship on ontology and pluriversal politics to challenge the stablished notion of infrastructure in STS. With this I argue about the potential of rethinking infrastructure not only as a concept, but also as a material and practical tool for pluriversal openings that could revitalize future decolonial projects in the diverse spaces where STS research participates.