Extending Critical Approaches to Agtech and Foodtech: Dialoguing Insights from the Insides and Outsides of Technology Design Projects

AgTech and FoodTech investment has been growing at a frenetic pace, and in ways which often exacerbate existing inequities in food and agriculture. Critical social scientists can often find themselves in a race to keep-up with the pace of innovation and to ensure empirical insights on the social implications of new technologies are included in deliberations about AgTech and FoodTech trajectories. At the same time, many critical social scientists find themselves included within technology design projects that reflect funding trends toward interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. Such scholars often do their best to apply critical social scientific insights in spaces where their response-abilities may compromised (Burch et al. forthcoming; Liboiron 2017). This can make it difficult for social scientists engaged in technology design to effectively shape technological trajectories in ways that lead to more equitable outcomes in AgTech and FoodTech.

This session is as an opportunity for social scientists working in the AgTech and FoodTech space to gather, share their research and collectively strategize about the kinds of scholarship that will be necessary to critically understand and more effectively shape current technological trajectories in food and agriculture.

This session will be organized as short presentations followed by longer discussion periods. We invite submissions which address, but are not limited to:

• Key topics in AgTech and FoodTech that require more attention.
• The main challenges facing social scientists in AgTech and FoodTech.
• Opportunities for social scientists to collaboratively address these key topics/challenges.
• Critical theories/methods that can support social scientists in addressing these key topics/challenges.