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Dear list members,

Writing on behalf of myself, George Cusworth of the University of Oslo and Anna Krzywoszynska of the University of Oulu, I am pleased to share a CfAs for our panel entitled "The data, the science, and the politics of representing the food system" for this year's 2025 Nordic STS conference in Stockholm. The conference, taking place on June 11th-13th, will be spread across Stockholm University and the Royal Institute for Technology KTH. Our panel focusses 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 we 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.

The submission portal is open from now 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.

Please see below for the full CfA details:

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 epidemological 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 nurersies, 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 hegeominc 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

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