Digital Agriculture Technology, Data Governance, and Resilient Agriculture-Food Futures

Digital agriculture technology (DAT) encompasses an expanding suite of tools – such as sensor-based and GPS-guided farming, GIS and satellite mapping, robotics, and AI-driven analytics – designed to enhance efficiency, productivity, and sustainability in agri-food production. Critical agri-food scholarship has interrogated the implications of DAT, particularly with respect to sustainability, power, and control within food systems. Despite this growing body of work, there remains limited sociological analysis of how DAT intersects with resilience: that is, how farmers and other agri-food actors prepare for, respond to, and adapt within conditions of environmental volatility (e.g., climate change), biological threats (e.g., pests and diseases), and geopolitical and market instability. This session foregrounds resilience as both an analytic and practical concern, with attention to how it is constructed across scales and shaped by governance arrangements, material infrastructures, and shifting forms of labour and expertise. We specifically invite contributions that:

• Interrogate how and in what ways different conceptualisations of resilience are relevant to understanding DAT;
• Analyse how resilience is imagined in socio-technical visions of DAT and in situated, everyday practices of digitalisation;
• Examine intersections with key analytical themes in DAT research, including commodification, financialization, and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI);
• Provide empirically grounded case studies of DAT that show how resilience capacities are co-produced, distributed, and experienced across different groups, places, and scales;
• Examine how power relations, governance arrangements, and inclusion/exclusion associated with DAT shape the distribution of resilience;
• Explore tensions and trade-offs, including how DAT may simultaneously enhance and undermine resilience.