Work Package 1: Reproduction of Nature in the High-Tech Bioeconomy (Miriam Boyer)
The Work Package focuses on how high technologies shape the process of the economic valorization of living nature from three perspectives. First, a historical approach analyzes how high technologies, particularly digital sensors, have aided in making available new material scales of nature for valorization. This historical context is important for understanding the genesis of the bioeconomy as a political-economic project in recent years. Second, the Work Package addresses valorization through two concepts: ‘biomass’ and ‘biodiversity’, showing the evolution of both from the early 20th century to the present. ‘Biomass’, as an expression of homogeneity, and ‘biodiversity’, as an expression of heterogeneity, have been important material qualities in shaping economic valorization and power relations surrounding living nature, from the early days of plant breeding to high-tech valorization of soils at the present. Third, the Work Package explores how high technologies have reshaped concepts of living nature—in society at large, as well as in social science theory. Here, the focus is on the political consequences of these conceptual shifts.
Key words: Key words: Materiality, valorization, spatial scales, high-tech
Work Package 2: Digitalization, Regulation and Democratization in the High-Tech-Bioeconomy (Sarah Hackfort)
The work package analyzes the role and the impact of precision technologies in different processes of appropriating and valorizing nature in the bioeconomy. It focuses on technologies that create an interface with bio-based processes at different scales (e.g. agricultural data platforms, precision agriculture, or digitally-enabled molecular biotechnologies). By doing so, it approaches high-tech transformations in the agri-food system as part of the bioeconomy and their implications for production and reproduction processes. To do so, it brings together political ecology perspectives with debates around technology and digitalization. Main research questions are a) how do the technologies shape and are shaped by power, inequalities and conflicts (e.g. over patents or data), b) what role do political institutions and societal actors play therein and c) how can the technologies and the social relations in which they are embedded be democratized? Research is informed by theoretical perspectives grounded in feminist theory, democracy theory, political ecology and critical perspectives on nature and technology. Empirical field work is planned in Germany, USA/Canada and Mexico.
Key words: politics of digitalization, democracy and (bio)technology, high-tech agriculture
Work Package 3: The startup-driven bioeconomy: Between promoting sustainability and maximizing returns (Cornelius Heimstädt)
This work package analyzes the role of startups in the sustainability transformation of agriculture. Startups are heralded by many key stakeholders from industry, politics and academia as important drivers of innovation in farming and thus as crucial organizations to mitigate the negative environmental impacts of agriculture. At the same time, a growing number of critics argue that startups’ pursuit of exponential growth to satisfy their investors stands in the way of a genuine pursuit of sustainability. Situated at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS), economic sociology and organization studies, this work package explores how actors in the agricultural startup economy navigate this tension between the pursuit of sustainability and the pursuit of maximizing returns on investment. Empirically, this question is investigated through ethnographic research in Germany’s emerging agtech field, for example in startups, accelerators and at trade fairs.
Work Package 5: Work, Value, and High Technology in the Bioeconomy (Johannes Fehrle)
This work package conceptualizes the economic and social practices that underlie the bioeconomy. The focus lies on the relation between labor, value, and the role of (high) technology. The goal of the first block is to bring together approaches from political economy and political ecology and adapt them to the realities of a technologically and economically altered biocapitalism. A second block engages conceptions of high technology in automation theory, feminist political ecology, and science and technology studies. It examines visions for a sustainable and just agricultural food production of the future in light of proclamations of a supposed end of human labor through automation technologies.
Key words: political economy, political ecology, work, value, technology, sustainability, just transition