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Paper short abstract

We explores sustainable agri-food initiatives as niches for transformation on the border between Spain and Portugal. By inviting local actors to dream of desirable futures, agricultural imaginaries emerge that unleash the potential of these initiatives to sustainably transform food systems.

Paper long abstract

The cross-border territory between Galicia (Spain) and Portugal is a Euroregion that shares deep historical, cultural and social-ecological roots. Although the agricultural landscapes of this territory face pressures from rural abandonment and agricultural intensification, they also maintain a rich mosaic of traditional practices. In this diverse cross-border context, sustainable agri-food initiatives are emerging as niches of transformation and examples of resistance to the dominant industrialised production system. Acting as laboratories of innovation, they integrate traditional knowledge with alternative practices to build agri-food systems that respect and care for nature and rural communities.

Although these initiatives emerge with a transformative goal, multiple social, political, and legislative barriers—exacerbated by administrative boundaries—significantly reduce their potential for change. To explore their transformative potential and the needs for their amplification, this study incorporates an analysis of agrarian imaginaries. In the current global context, characterized by overlapping social, ecological, economic, and geopolitical crises, asking local actors to imagine desirable futures has been considered a transformative tool. Imagining desirable futures fosters creativity, social-ecological innovation and enables other ways of thinking, doing and producing food.

Through 40 semi-structured interviews across the border area, this research invites initiative leaders to imagine desirable futures for their projects, the territory, and agri-food systems, leaving aside current financial and bureaucratic constraints. By analysing these projected desires, this study not only maps the agricultural imaginaries that drive these initiatives, but also identifies the strategies needed to overcome barriers, allowing the full deployment of their potential to sustainably transform agri-food systems and rural areas.

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Paper short abstract

This paper looks at multi-stakeholder platforms in the cocoa sector to get a grip on how the infrastructuralization of alternative futures forecloses non-hegemonic alternatives for current supply chains and proposes infrastructural interventions to mobilize different concepts of alternativity.

Paper long abstract

This paper engages the infrastructure of cocoa supply chains to analyze what futures they support and which alternatives they foreclose. Inspired by Miriam Posner's work on logistical software and supply chain infrastructures (2018, 2026), I focus on the installed base of current global food systems to get a grip on "the inability to conceive of plausible non-hegemonic futures" (cf. panel abstract).

Specifically, I look at multi-stakeholder platforms (MSP) in the cocoa sector as a mechanisms for negotiating alternative futures and a sustainable chocolate industry. MSPs are the fora where standards (e.g. for certification of sustainable cocoa) are set and thresholds for being included in industry supply chains are defined. Similar to logistical and supply chain software, MSPs allow operationalizing certain ideas of sustainability but typically perpetuate colonial trade patterns (Hoffelmeyer et al. 2022, Schuster & Mossig 2024).

Based on an analysis of SwissCo, a multi-stakeholder platform founded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) to "improve the living conditions of cocoa farmers, to protect natural resources, and to promote biodiversity in cocoa producing countries," I elaborate on how the infrastructuralization of alternative futures often prevents the development of viable alternatives to current supply chains. I argue, however, that STS approaches can inform practice-based research that mobilizes different concepts of alternativity through infrastructural interventions.

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Paper short abstract

This paper explores the politics of moves seeking to integrate cultured meat within traditional farming. It draws upon 15 years of interviews to explore how cultured meat as continuity is constructed and mobilised, and then interpreted and in some instances resisted by those within farming.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores the politics of moves seeking to integrate cultured meat - meat grown from cells as opposed to cut from carcass – within traditional farming environments. Early cultured meat pioneers in the 2010s framed their technology as a clear alternative, indeed potential replacement, to livestock farming. However, increasingly, some within the cultured meat sector have sought to align cultured meat as a form of adaptive continuity within farming, with a varying range of responses from farmers. One example is Respect Farms, a Dutch initiative that in November 2025 installed a cultured meat production facility on a farm that ‘integrates… into existing farm operations’. Another example is start-up company Everygreen, who use living cow's plasma as cultured meat culture media, to ‘partner with global meat producers to create year-round stability’. This paper draws upon 15 years of interviews within the cultured meat community, and most recently stakeholder interviews including farmers in the UK, to explore how cultured meat as continuity is constructed and mobilised, and then interpreted and in some instances resisted by those within farming. Attention is paid to the moral framing of continuity, how it is embedded within a ‘just transition’ discourse, through which cultured meat protagonists perform a particularly constituted network of relations of care towards farmers, and how farmers rearticulate this relationship from their own perspectives. In all, the paper considers the social and political stakes of positioning an alternative as integrable.

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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography and apprenticeship in rural China, this paper examines how changing human-microbial-environmental relations amid agrarian change reshape local fermentation practices and the situated figures microbes take on as hygienic risk, unruly vitality, and unstable productive force.

Paper long abstract

This paper is based on my ethnography in Hujiang, a village in southern China, where I used apprenticeship as a method to learn three fermentation practices alongside villagers: vegetable pickling, rice wine brewing, and organic composting. Through this practical engagement, I examine situated human-microbial-environmental relations within everyday fermentation practices and ask how these relations are being reconfigured in the course of agrarian change.

In Hujiang, fermentation practices historically worked through collaboration with microbial processes in interconnected ways: they preserved perishable crops and extended their edibility, easing seasonal food shortages; and they reworked agricultural waste, such as animal manure, into usable forms. Through these functions, fermentation linked crop production, food preservation, livestock feeding, and soil fertilization within a metabolic network that sustained ecological cycles and rural livelihoods.

Today, this network no longer operates smoothly. Microbial processes are increasingly reworked by food safety regulation, market valuation, and input-intensive agricultural modernization. These frictions are reflected in changing figures of microbes, whose dangerousness as hygienic risk, unruly vitality, and unstable productive force are foregrounded differently across practices, and also in villagers’ livelihood struggles and shifting ecological conditions. In pickling, microbes appear as a nitrite risk; in rice wine brewing, as an unruly force translated into measurable value through the hydrometer; in composting, as a slower process displaced by agrochemical inputs. Apprenticeship allowed me to encounter these shifts directly and to place villagers’ livelihoods and ecological conditions within a shared metabolic network of microbial processes.