Sarah Hackfort will chair the panel “Unravelling the Political Ecology of Technologies and Digitalization in the Agri-food System” at the POLLEN24 conference in Lund, Sweden.
Panel Description
Over the past decades, a convergence of multiple crises, including the 2007/08 food crisis and other socio-ecological crises, brought to the surface awareness of the fragility of the global food system and raised concerns regarding future access to food and its availability to feed the world’s growing population without exacerbating the negative
environmental impacts of current food production. New farming techniques, developed along the lines of technological innovations and the digitalisation of agriculture, currently occupy a growing place in the agriculture field. Described by some as the fourth agricultural revolution, these techniques are being promoted by a variety of actors as a solution to feed a growing global population with less (as well as more precise) and thus more sustainable use of inputs.
While some attention has been given to the digitalisation of agriculture in social science research including science and technology studies and critical food studies, the scholarship has so far given limited attention to the intersection between the material and discursive practices around technology, digitalisation, and innovation, and its intersection with the policies and discourses on environmental politics. Particularly lacking are historical studies on the digitalisation of agriculture, and whether or not this “revolution” and its environmental impacts are different from previous ones (such as the Green Revolution or the industrialisation of agriculture).
In this panel, we want to put forward the important insights that can be gained from adopting a political ecology perspective in addressing technological innovations and the digitalisation of agriculture, topics that have so far rarely been addressed from a political ecology perspective. We aim to bring together conceptual and empirical contributions from a variety of geographical areas. We invite abstract submissions that analyse the materiality and narratives of technological innovations and the digitalisation of agriculture as they relate to environmental politics, as well as historical analyses on these topics.