Eurograd message

                Dear all,


I would like to extend a CfAs for a session I am running with Anna
Krzywoszynska at the 2025 Nordics STS conference. The conference is running in
Stockholm from the 11th-13th of June and is entitled The data, the science,
and the politics of representing the food system.



The panel will focus on the production of knowledge in the food system, and
the different types of politics and food system futures they are helping to
create. We are interested in the way data-intensive research methods,
governance protocols, and practitioner advice tools are changing the way food
is being produced, distributed, and consumed. We want to critique the way
powerful actors in the food system are using this datafication to secure their
hegemonic position - but also want to celebrate the way the way alternative
food system actors are scavenging, hacking, and repurposing the ideals and
technologies of modernity in service of more just and sustainable futures. We
are interested in featuring diverse critical STS, geography, feminist, and
political ecological perspectives.



The submission portal is open until the first of March and can be found by
following this link. Titles can
be 150 characters and the abstract 250 words.  Please feel free to contact me
if you have any further questions. The full panel description and CfAs and can
be found below.


Thanks,



-------------



The data, the science, and the politics of representing the food system

Agriculture has long featured as a site of study for STS scholars. Of
particular interest has been the metrics and measures used to both represent
the food systems and act on it. Despite the long history of critical actors
articulating the need for alternative land management practices and
re-imagined eating habits, the overall trajectory has been towards power
consolidation and agricultural intensification. This trend has undermined the
complexity and resilience both of agricultural livelihoods and the
more-than-human configurations that form farming landscapes.



Reductive scientific and economistic representations have helped drive this
trajectory. Soil fertility has become a function of nitrogen, phosphorus, and
potassium levels; a foodstuffs healthiness has become knowable through its
macro-nutrient content; and agricultural policy has been organised around food
security concerns and consumption-production balances. Whilst these
representations have played their part in driving huge hikes in agricultural
productivity (at least for some), they have also contributed to the
entrenchment of power imbalances, the degradation of agro-ecological health,
and a reinforcement of the gendered and racialised distribution of the harms
of agricultural pollution. Despite the fact that agricultural landscapes and
rural lives have become ever more known through datafication, we see no
progress in transforming the environmental footprint of agricultural
production, or in the highly selective ways that the benefits of food
production accrue. In diverse ways, STS work in this area has shown how
justice has not been served well in the food system.



This panel asks STS scholars to reflect on the directions the food system is
being taken in today, and how emerging modes of representation and knowledge
production are reshaping its orientation. As new publics seek to highlight the
ecological and epidemiological harms associated with contemporary food
production, and as new scientific and cultural representations are working to
depict socio-ecological systems with higher degrees of resolution, we might
wonder what role scientific and other forms of knowledge production are
playing in the creation of new rural realities. And how alternative food
system actors are scavenging, hacking, and repurposing the ideals and
technologies of modernity in service of more just and sustainable futures. We
might also speculate as to how STS might help realise this potential. Less
optimistically, we might also wonder whether powerful food system actors are
absorbing new ways of thinking about and representing the food system to
shore-up their ongoing position in it.



We therefore invite papers engaging with questions around the representation
of agricultural places, landscapes, systems, processes, products, and
livelihoods. We especially encourage papers which go beyond critique by
seeking to understand what forms of knowledge-making might advance social,
environmental, and multi-species justice. Our empirical scope, here, is broad,
and encompasses the diverse actors and places implicated in the production,
processing, distribution, and consumption of food: fertiliser plants, market
gardens, plant nurseries, biofertiliser labs, agricultural fields, local food
markets, machinery manufacturers, farming app-developers, the offices of
agricultural extension workers, supermarkets, food marketing agencies and so
on. We are particularly interested in research grappling with the contribution
the food system makes to socio-ecological crisis, and the new data
infrastructures and scientific methods that are (re)shaping how the food
system is represented in social and political life. These lines of inquiry
lead us to wonder whether and how new approaches to knowledge production are
themselves becoming the site of food system contestation; contestations that
are drawing in actors with highly divergent visions for the future of food all
of whom are looking to advance their cause through data, representation, and
knowledge.


Although not limited to them, we are interested in the following questions:



How are calls for justice being honoured or obscured by new modes of
scientific representation?



What sub-altern modes of knowing and relating to food have been excluded in
mainstream food system settings? And how might they be positioned to enjoy a
more prominent place in how food is known and governed?



How are different actors articulating and advancing particular food system
futures via specific modes of measurement and representation  v specific
approaches to representation?



How can complex agroecosystems be represented in ways that can yield just food
system outcomes?



How do powerful actors seek to reproduce their hegemonic place in the food
system via particular approaches to knowing and representing?



What are the justice consequences of the accumulation of agricultural data?



How are food system models changing, and what impacts are those changes having
on food system governance at a local, national, and global scale?







Dr. George Cusworth [he/him]

Post-doctoral Researcher

Dynamic Territory Project

IFIKK

Universitetet i Oslo
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