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Agricultural drones in India reshape caste and gendered labour, marginalise farmers’ knowledge, and advance state and corporate-led agrarian modernisation, operating with partial understanding of agrarian realities and producing sociotechnical inequalities.

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This paper explores discussions around agricultural drone technology that have emerged in India, examining claims about its potential and how the country’s agrarian future is constructed in state policy decisions. It also investigates the intersection of drone technology, embodied labour, and farmers’ knowledge, and how these are mediated, reconfigured, and transformed. The objective is to analyse how technology interacts with and reshapes the material, physical, and embodied dimensions of gendered and caste-marked labour that produces forms of sociotechnical injustice. The study contributes to discussions on technology, caste, and the labouring body, theorising the complex dynamics of displacement, devaluation, and transformation in agrarian India. It focuses on the economic logic of agriculture centred on efficiency, productivity, and profitability, and how this intersects with the social and political logic of farming, skills, and situated knowledge, especially when tools and equipment become sites of social control.

By drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), this ethnographic enquiry examines how drone technology disrupts culturally embedded labour and knowledge. It analyses how Drone Didis, farmers, and agricultural labourers co-produce meaning with drones. It argues that drones enable data-driven precision to operate with partial understandings of complex agrarian realities, reinforcing expert–user divides. It further interprets drones as inherently political artefacts that embed inequality by determining access, control, and exclusion (Akrich 1992; Pacey 1983; Winner 1990) In this way, the state’s centralised agricultural modernisation agenda advances expert-led, technocratic control by shifting authority away from embodied, experiential understandings of farming. Keywords- Labour, knowledge, agriculture, socio-technical injustice, Agricultural drones

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As GenAI enters agricultural extension, it is framed as a labour-saving substitute. Drawing on workshops with African extension officers, this paper shows how AI redistributes and intensifies advisory work, anticipating the gendered and relational labour that persists in hybrid human–AI systems.

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As generative AI is introduced into agricultural extension, policy and innovation narratives increasingly position conversational agents as scalable substitutes for human advisors. This paper challenges that imaginary. Drawing on action research workshops with extension officers in Malawi, Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, and Liberia, I examine how advisory labour is being reconfigured in anticipation of GenAI-enabled systems.

Building on STS scholarship on labour automation, I conceptualise extension as “digiwork”: a blend of symbolic (sensemaking and interpretation), material (technology integration and troubleshooting), and relational (trust-building and negotiation) labour. Through role-play exercises on intent classification, problem diagnosis, and gender-sensitive decision-making, extension officers made visible the tacit, embodied, and context-rich practices required to translate vague farmer queries into actionable guidance. Far from disappearing, this labour intensifies under digitalisation, as advisors absorb new responsibilities for data entry, platform navigation, accountability for algorithmic outputs, and digital upskilling.

The findings show that GenAI does not simply automate advisory expertise. Rather, it risks hollowing out opportunities for practicing judgment while simultaneously amplifying responsibility asymmetries and emotional labour. At the same time, extension officers actively engage in what might be called anticipatory assembling: negotiating which aspects of their work are automatable and which must remain relational and embodied.

By foregrounding agricultural labour within STS debates on automation, this paper argues for hybrid human–AI systems grounded in responsible innovation, participatory governance, and explicit recognition of the social infrastructures that sustain agricultural knowledge.

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Why are the detrimental impacts of agricultural robotics on workers so easily sidestepped? Drawing on the sociology of ignorance, we identify economic, technological, environmental and ideological rationales used to justify why job loss among agricultural workers can be ignored.

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How can we explain that some detrimental impacts of technology are regarded as unfair, yet others are ignored? We investigate this question by studying why negative impacts of agricultural robotics on workers are commonly ignored with apparent ease.

Agribots are expected to change the nature of agricultural work. Besides increasing productivity and autonomy for farmers, concerns have been raised about job losses for farmworkers and deepening labour hierarchies between farm-owners and farmworkers. However, despite clear indications that farmworkers may be disproportionally negatively affected by agribots, these detrimental impacts are virtually ignored in the dominant discourse on agribots. In this paper, we explore how the detrimental impacts of agribots can so readily be sidestepped.

We argue that such ‘ignorance’ is an active discursive construct. A growing body of literature in STS highlights that ignorance is not merely an epistemological deficiency (Gross and McGoey 2015) but that non-knowing or ignorance can also be understood as a valuable and productive strategic resource in and of itself (McGoey 2012). We argue that attending to the construction of ignorance regarding the detrimental labour implications of agribots can help in understanding how the marginal position of farmworkers is further entrenched by technological developments.

Based on a systematic discourse analysis and interviews with key stakeholders in Dutch agribot development, we identify four central ignorance rationales: economic, technological, environmental and ideological arguments that are used to justify why job loss among agricultural workers can be ignored, acting as a discursive shield to legitimize the further marginalization of farmworkers.

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The article examines landscapes by Spain's Instituto Nacional de Colonización, a technical organization that built a supraterritorial infrastructure focused on food production. Analyzing its outcomes helps understand a singular vision of modernity linked to 20th-century authoritarian regimes.

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Over three hundred new settlements were established across Spain's main river basins in less than twenty-five years. Military aircraft captured aerial images that informed a detailed plan in which each plant, animal, and distance was designed to serve a political and technocratic goal: constructing a national food-supply infrastructure. This also aimed to create an efficient workforce aligned with the political principles of the regime. The Instituto Nacional de Colonización carried out this ambitious project.

This research explores Latour's critique of modernity and Griffin's idea of alternative modernity, situated within the context of 20th-century European authoritarian regimes. It investigates the modernisation of rural life during the Franco regime through the work of INC. It was responsible for implementing a territorial design programme aimed at radical modernisation, guided by the political principles of Francoism. Within the INC, different disciplines established new synthetic environments subject to scientific rigour, with the aim of developing new environments focused on agricultural production.

On the one hand, the focus shifts to a single case study—in Galicia—the practical application of the technical and scientific principles of agricultural modernisation, analysing the infrastructural system in which agents of different natures perform specific roles. It is necessary to clarify this modernisation by examining the differing elements to identify the unique features of an authoritarian regime. The malfunctions of this carefully constructed environment, many of which still persist today, allow us to reconstruct, from the traces, the blind spots of a modern, cold vision born of technical and vertical blindness.

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This analysis reconstructs a dominant AI narrative of automation and precision through which agricultural actors make sense of an uncertain future. By analyzing ambivalence unsettling this narrative, it reveals value conflicts and provokes deliberation on how the future could be otherwise.

Paper long abstract

Technological innovation in the agricultural sector is often heralded as the ultimate fix to grand challenges such as labor shortages and food security. In promissory narratives, AI systems are envisioned as being composed of sensors and robots, which inform decision-making and automate labor on farms. Such AI narratives leave little room for conceiving of alternatives because the future appears as pre-determined and inevitable. To highlight that it could come otherwise, research on the future of agriculture often foregrounds exceptional reflexive accounts of actors who tend to live on the fringes. In this presentation, however, we highlight that alterity exists within hegemonic discourse. Based on a case study on fruit growing in the Netherlands, we analyze interruptions within a promissory AI narrative of automation and precision, which pervades empirical material gathered in a student project, stakeholder interviews and field visits. By reading the empirical material against the grain, we recognize that those who tell this narrative experience ambivalence, which we consider as affective manifestations of value conflicts. To alleviate the unpleasant experience of ambivalence, alternative values are dismissed, for instance by depreciating feeling and judgement against scientific knowledge in agricultural labor, prioritizing economic profitability over environmental sustainability, and foregrounding innovation while backgrounding politics. We take such oft-overlooked subjectivity seriously by cultivating sensitivity for ambivalence within a seemingly coherent narrative. Ambivalence reveals that the future is not as fixed as it may appear and that there is room for ethical reflection on what sustainable agriculture and just labor conditions could look like.

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This paper explores how the use of zai pits in Mali reshapes agricultural labour. Drawing on STS, it examines how indigenous farming techniques reorganize rather than replace farm work, challenging dominant ideas that link agricultural innovation mainly to automation and labour reduction.

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Agricultural innovation is increasingly framed through imaginaries of automation, datafication, and “farms without farmers” (Legun et al., 2023; Rotz et al., 2019). Yet in much of the Global South, agricultural futures are shaped by labour-intensive indigenous technologies rather than robotics or AI. This paper interrogates the co-production of agricultural technology and labour through the case of zai pits in Mali, a traditional soil and water conservation technique widely used across the Sahel (Reij et al., 2009; Zougmoré et al., 2014).

Drawing on science and technology studies (STS) and political ecology, I analyze zai pits as a socio-technical assemblage that reorganizes labour, gender relations, and land tenure practices. While often celebrated as a low-cost climate adaptation strategy, zai cultivation requires intensive manual work, digging, composting, and maintaining pits, raising questions about who performs this labour and under what conditions. Adoption is shaped by gendered access to land and resources, as well as household labour hierarchies (Cervigni et al., 2016; Sumberg et al., 2012).

Grounded in my early stages of mixed-methods fieldwork in the Segou region of Mali, this paper examines how agricultural technologies and labour relations are co-produced through indigenous soil restoration practices such as zai pits. Rather than assuming innovation reduces labour, the paper explores how zai adoption reshapes the organization and valuation of farm work. Engaging STS debates on socio-technical imaginaries and agricultural futures, it assesses how labour-intensive indigenous technologies challenge dominant narratives linking agricultural innovation to efficiency, mechanization, and labour displacement.

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This paper examines how large-scale white farmers in post-apartheid South Africa envision the future of farm work through digital technologies. Based on fieldwork in the Western Cape's fruit sector, it challenges universalizing assumptions about agricultural digitalization and labor imaginaries.

Paper long abstract

Industrial agriculture is undergoing rapid digital transformation as precision technologies, data platforms, and automated systems reshape production across global value chains. Yet the labor implications of agricultural digitalization remain undertheorized, particularly from perspectives that foreground the co-production of technology and labor in postcolonial settings.

Socio-technical imaginaries of agricultural futures vary significantly across global contexts. While farmers in the global North increasingly frame their visions around productivity optimization and environmental sustainability, South African farmers articulate distinct imaginaries shaped by their specific socio-political landscape, in which labor is a central concern. This paper examines how large-scale white farmers in post-apartheid South Africa envision the future of farm work amid racial and class tensions.

Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2022 and 2023 in the Western Cape's fresh fruit farming and packing sector, including more than 50 semi-structured interviews with farm managers, packhouse operators, workers, and labor representatives, alongside participant observation in production facilities, the analysis demonstrates how race, land politics, and economic precarity shape technological imaginaries and future-making practices in ways that diverge significantly from dominant narratives emerging from the global North. By examining these situated imaginaries, the paper challenges universalizing assumptions about agricultural digitalization and highlights how historical legacies and contemporary political tensions mediate farmers' engagements with and imaginaries of digital technologies and labor.

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In this paper, I review literature on labour and digitalization in agriculture, and draw from empirical data from interviews with farmers, to discuss the role of digital technologies in class dynamics in agriculture.

Paper long abstract

Labor scarcity and the poor conditions of agricultural work, combined with the degradation of environmental resources, has fueled the extensive investment in new digital technologies for food production. These are often touted to alleviate the need for migrant workers, to make work higher skilled and more enjoyable, and to reduce the environmental impact of farming through precision. In this paper, I review literature on labour and digitalization in agriculture, and draw from empirical data from interviews with farmers, to discuss the role of digital technologies in class dynamics in agriculture. Attending to embodiment, ecology, and knowledge, the paper grounds its analysis across interrelated dimensions: the occupational status of farming and farm ownership; the hierarchical structure of farm labour; and, intergenerational knowledge politics as connected to land ownership. In making these observations, I build insights into how digitalization and new AI technologies interact with labour regimes and class politics in agriculture. Doing so contributes to conversations about labour relations affected by new digital tools as well as the value of science and technology studies for interrogating class politics.