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Paper short abstract

The paper argues that agricultural innovation systems privilege sustainable intensification, sidelining agroecological knowledge. It proposes redesigning epistemic infrastructures in projectified science, with reflexive societal readiness assessment as an method for enabling hermeneutic justice.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how contemporary agricultural innovation enacts different publics through the infrastructural arrangements that organize research, governance, and agricultural practices. This shows how infrastructures both distribute and delimit the hermeneutic resources through which actors’ experiences and claims become obscured. Using a multi sited ethnographic design, the paper examines three epistemic spaces that structure contemporary agricultural innovation: (1) a Horizon-Europe funded consortium, as an exemplar of “projectified” science where proposal templates, metrics, and regulatory requirements pre configure publics technology adopters; (2) policy and research regimes, where evaluation standards, funding architectures, training curriculums, and governance instruments selectively validate particular knowledge forms while marginalizing others; and (3) agroecology networks, which develops alternative epistemic infrastructures like festivals, seed networks, and communal learning spaces and cultivate publics grounded in experiential, socio ecological, and justice oriented ways of knowing. Across these sites, the paper traces how “publics” are made through infrastructural arrangements to enable certain concerns, experiences, and futures to become intelligible, and in doing so, shape the conditions in which ‘hermeneutic injustices’ are embedded. The study highlights how agricultural futures are shaped through frictions among these epistemic infrastructures and reveal the role of governance tools such as ‘Societal Readiness Assessment’, which both expose and delimit the possibilities for reflexive engagement.

Keywords- Epistemic infrastructure, Hermeneutic injustice, Agroecological knowledge, RRI, Societal readiness