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- Convenors:
-
Koen Beumer
Katharine Legun (Wageningen)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
Agriculture has a distinct politics of knowledge and labor, currently being reshaped by the rapid growth of new data intensive technologies, among others. This panel will consider how socio-technical imaginaries of farming are enacted and intersect with labor politics, practices, and possibilities.
Description
This panel aims to explore the intersection between agriculture, science and technology, and labour. Research in STS has long paid attention to questions of labour (Winner 1980), including feminist and postcolonial perspectives that revealed hidden and unrecognized forms of work that are constitutional to science and technology. Recently this has been complimented by a renewed attention for the labor implications of digital innovations, especially in the context of data workers and platform workers.
Within science and technology studies, little attention has been paid to agricultural labour. This is remarkable because agricultural work represents over a quarter of total global employment (FAO 2023; ILO 2020) and the nature and value of this work is deeply entangled with science and technology. Furthermore, there is broad consensus that recent scientific and technological advances are set to dramatically impact agricultural labor. Innovations as diverse as artificial intelligence, drones, vertical farms, new genomic techniques, and advanced robotics are expected to change the nature of agricultural work, generate new dependencies between farmers and corporations and deepen labour hierarchies (Rotz et al. 2019; Phillips et al. 2019), and possibly entrench rationalized industrial ideals of farms without workers (Legun et al. 2023), thereby shaping not only the future of work, but also of agricultural systems more generally.
We aim to put this topic firmly on the STS agenda and leverage STS insights to further our understanding of this contested domain: the intersection between labour, and agricultural science and technology. We invite contributions that draw on STS concepts and insights to (1) understand how agricultural technologies and labor are currently co-produced, and to (2) explore what futures for agricultural labor and technology are worth realizing and how to do it. What role can STS play in co-creating alternatives socio-technical futures in which more desirable forms of work are realized?