Country life: agricultural technologies and the emergence of new rural subjectivities

Rural areas have long been spaces of technological experimentation, development and resistance. In the UK, this is especially true in the post-second world war era of productivist food regimes, characterised by moves to intensification. The technologies that have developed have variously aimed to increase yields, automate previously manual tasks, and create new forms of life. This review focuses on the relationships between agricultural technologies and rural lives. While there has been considerable media emphasis on the material modification, and creation, of new rural lives through emerging genetic technologies, the review highlights the role of technologies in co-producing new rural subjectivities. It does this through exploring relationships between agricultural technologies and gender, changing approaches to understanding and intervening in animal lives, and how automation shifts responsibility for productive work on farms. In each of these instances, even ostensibly mundane technologies can significantly affect what it is to be a farmer, a farm advisor or a farm animal. However, the review cautions against technological determinism, drawing on recent work from Science and Technology Studies to show that technologies do not simply reconfigure lives but are themselves transformed by the actors and activities with which they are connected. The review ends by suggesting avenues for future research

Bovine and human becomings in histories of dairy technologies: robotic milking systems and remaking animal and human subjectivity

This paper positions the recent emergence of robotic or automatic milking systems (AMS) in relation to discourses surrounding the longer history of milking technologies in the UK and elsewhere. The mechanisation of milking has been associated with sets of hopes and anxieties which permeated the transition from hand to increasingly automated forms of milking. This transition has affected the relationships between humans and cows on dairy farms, producing different modes of cow and human agency and subjectivity. In this paper, drawing on empirical evidence from a research project exploring AMS use in contemporary farms, we examine how ongoing debates about the benefits (or otherwise) of AMS relate to longer-term discursive currents surrounding the historical emergence of milking technologies and their implications for efficient farming and the human and bovine experience of milk production. We illustrate how technological change is in part based on understandings of people and cows, at the same time as bovine and human agency and subjectivity are entrained and reconfigured in relation to emerging milking technologies, so that what it is to be a cow or human becomes different as technologies change. We illustrate how this results from – and in – competing ways of understanding cows: as active agents, as contributing to technological design, as ‘free’, as ‘responsible’ and/or as requiring surveillance and discipline, and as efficient co-producers, with milking technologies, of milk

Assembling ocean life: more-than-human entanglements in the Blue economy

While welcoming the intervention of Winders and Le Heron as opening up a space for critical – and practical – engagement with so-called ‘Blue Economy’ thinking, their employment of assemblage approaches could be extended. Doing so might produce a different conceptualisation of the blue economy, while concurrently establishing new challenges for blue economic practices. In this commentary, I focus on three key areas: 1) the ontological separation of land and sea and the conceptualisation of ‘marine space’; 2) the ‘liveliness’ of oceans; and 3) practical possibilities for Blue Economy policies to draw on and engage with ‘wet ontologies’. I argue that future geographical research on the Blue Economy would benefit from moving away from categorisations of the ‘ecological’ or ‘bio’ and towards a fuller engagement with the diversity of actants and forces that contribute to the emergence of new practices, policies and (de)territorialisations

Making insects tick: responsibility, attentiveness and care in edible insect farming

Insects are increasingly promoted as a sustainable and nutritious source of protein, with ‘edible insect’ sectors emerging in many countries not traditionally associated with their consumption. A number of studies have examined the attitudes of potential consumers to eating insects but the understandings and practices of farmers have largely been ignored. This paper expands nature-societyscholarship’sengagement with the edible insect sector by investigating how farmers make sense of their responsibilitiesto insects through their everyday practices. Drawing on a qualitative study of the UK’s edible insect farmers, the paper contributes to wider ongoing debates within STS and animal studies around multispecies companionship involving apparently ‘awkward’ creatures, and around the relationship between ‘care’ and ‘ethical regard’ in more-than-human relations. Such debates are especially pertinent here, as insects have often been understood as lacking sentience and beyond moral considerability, resulting in their exclusion from animal welfare codes and regulation. Insect farmers are therefore faced with questions not only about how to care for their ‘mini livestock’ but also whether to care. Following an outline of the UK’s edible insect production sector, and framed by a discussion of literature on awkward creatures, attentiveness and practices of care, the paper reports on: (1) the relationship between sentience and farmers’ constructions of insects’ moral significance; (2) farmers’ motives for, and approaches to, becoming attentiveto their insects; and (3) how farmers respond to the actions of insects. It concludes by reflecting on the nature of attentiveness encountered in edible insect farming, arguing that it offers a promising yet unstable basis for the development of harmonious more-than-human relations

Salmon by Numbers: Quantification and Understandings of Nature

This paper studies moves to quantify Scotland's salmon catches, and the reactions and interpretations that these quantifications provoke. The first significant attempts to measure salmon catches developed in the late nineteenth century as fishery managers felt unable to test the effectiveness of management measures they had instituted. Legal provision for the collation of catch statistics was made in the mid‐twentieth century. The paper gives a detailed study of what this collection and collation involves. In doing so, and in examining subsequent reactions and interpretations, it demonstrates that the statistics, originating in anglers’ catches but being processed by a scientific laboratory, represent a hybrid knowledge form, which does not conform to traditional classifications of scientific or local. It also examines what happens to the salmon themselves through this process of quantification, individuals caught in various times and places united on a single graph as the total Scottish salmon resource. The paper argues that successful salmon management policies would re‐focus on the role of individual fish, as it is these individuals that form the amalgamated catches and with which anglers interact

Exploring the human-animal-technology nexus: power relations and divergent conduct. The example of automated dairy farming.

This chapter develops an agenda for discussing less-than-convivial more-than-human relations. It reviews existing work on such relations before developing a terminology of ‘divergent conduct’ aiming to better express such relationships. The chapter uses an empirical case study of automated or robotic milking systems, and focuses on the relationships these establish between machines, humans, and cows in specific places. Divergent conduct aims to express how humans and nonhumans co-produce activities which are likely to differ from accounts of trouble-free introductions of technologies. The concept emphasises the agency of animals while paying attention to their relationships with people and machines. As such, it emphasises how farming is constituted in relation to multiple human and nonhuman requirements, and their related conducts, which may pull in different directions. The chapter argues that divergent conduct provides a way of exploring problematic entanglements in which inequalities of power can be many-layered and intersectional

Visualising human-animal-technology relations : fieldnotes, still photography and digital video on the robotic dairy farm

This paper explores the potential for developing less anthropocentric approaches to researching human-nonhuman relations through visual ethnography, critically examining the potential for conceptualising nonhuman animals as participants. Arguing that method in “more-than-human geography” and animal studies has developed at a slower pace than theory, it proposes visual approaches as a means through which to foreground the behaviour and actions of nonhuman animals in social research. This challenges underlying anthropocentric assumptions of visual ethnography, questioning the meaning of “participation” in visual research. The paper presents a comparison of approaches used in studying practices of robotic milking on dairy farms in the UK. Specifically, it compares the qualities of field notes, still photography and digital video in focusing on particular sites, moments and movements of robotic milking. While visual approaches are not a panacea for more-than-human research, we suggest that they do offer a means through which nonhumans might “speak for themselves” in social research. Rather than presenting definitive accounts, the inclusion of video in such work not only illustrates arguments but also leaves the actions of nonhumans open to further interpretation; the centrality of the researcher is destabilised

Understanding and (dis)trusting food assurance schemes::Consumer confidence and the ‘knowledge fix’

This paper uses evidence from focus groups with consumers in England to consider how consumers understand and evaluate a range of proxies or intermediary organisations that offer assurance about food and consumer products, particularly voluntary certification schemes. This addresses the current concern in developed economies about providing information in order to reconnect consumers with food producers and to support moves towards more local, fairly traded and sustainable production. However, we show that such a ‘knowledge fix’ approach of providing information may not reconnect consumers so easily. Participants found it particularly difficult to work out what certification involved and what kinds of organisations were providing assurance. They built vernacular typologies and comparative judgements that did not necessarily identify or prioritise ‘independent’ third-party certification as the gold standard, not least because of the practical difficulties of monitoring complex supply chains, and expressed confusion and scepticism about how well food assurance schemes could work in practice. Our results therefore problematise the knowledge fix urged in the literature and emphasise instead the need to better understand how consumers make sense of assurance information in different contexts