The integration of a Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) approach to food systems can contribute to redirect research and innovation toward the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 - Zero hunger - as well as other intertwined SDGs. Even though the scientific literature bridging RRI and food systems has grown over the past years, no critical reviews of this scholarship are currently available. This paper fills this gap by producing a critical review of the scientific literature on RRI in food systems (...) that has been published between 2017 and 2023. Our search led to a selection of 47 research articles that were analysed for this review. Our findings show that studies in this scholarship have focused on the stages of inputs/agricultural production, with a focus on digital technologies for agriculture. When analysing the motivations for applying RRI, we found that this varied from reasons that are more market-related, such as increasing technologies’ societal acceptance, to a reorientation of food systems towards the tackling of societal challenges. Concerning the conceptualization of RRI in food systems, we found that scholars relied on a widely known definition, but its interpretation varied greatly among the studies. Finally, we analysed how RRI has been applied in this literature and found that while some scholars provided examples of responsible innovation, others applied it to analyse innovation governance, and others used RRI to analyze research projects or innovations to ‘improve’ their alignment with this concept. Overall, this literature review showed that there is a need to develop more collaborative and reflexive work to unlock RRI’s potential to inform policy and practice that can foster more responsive and inclusive food systems capable of achieving SDG2. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary research needs innovation. As an action-oriented intervention, this Manifesto begins from the authors’ experiences as social scientists working within interdisciplinary science and technology collaborations in agriculture and food. We draw from these experiences to: 1) explain what social scientists contribute to interdisciplinary agri-food tech collaborations; (2) describe barriers to substantive and meaningful collaboration; and (3) propose ways to overcome these barriers. We encourage funding bodies to develop mechanisms that ensure funded projects respect the integrity of social science expertise and (...) incorporate its insights. We also call for the integration of social scientific questions and methods in interdisciplinary projects from the outset, and for a genuine curiosity on the part of STEM and social science researchers alike about the knowledge and skills each of us has to offer. We contend that cultivating such integration and curiosity within interdisciplinary collaborations will make them more enriching for all researchers involved, and more likely to generate socially beneficial outcomes. (shrink)

Over recent decades, influential agri-food tech actors, institutions, policymakers and others have fostered dominant techno-optimistic, future visions of food and agriculture that are having profound material impacts in present agri-food worlds. Analyzing such realities has become paramount for scholars working across the fields of science and technology studies (STS) and critical agri-food studies, many of whom contribute to STSFAN—the Science and Technology Studies Food and Agriculture Network. This article introduces a Special Issue featuring the scholarship of STSFAN members, which cover (...) a range of case studies and interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary engagements involving such contested agri-food futures. Their contributions are unique in that they emerged from the network’s specific modus operandi: a workshopping practice that supports the constructive, interdisciplinary dialogue necessary for critical research and rigorous analyses of science and technology in agri-food settings. This introduction offers an overview of STS and critical agri-food studies scholarship, including their historical entanglements in respective studies of food scandals, scientific regimes and technological determinism. We illustrate how interdisciplinary engagement across these fields has contributed to the emergent field of what we term agri-food technoscience scholarship, which the contributions of this Special Issue speak to. After a brief discussion of STS concepts, theories and methods shaping agri-food policy, technology design and manufacturing, we present the eleven Special Issue contributions in three thematic clusters: influential actors and their agri-food imaginaries; obfuscated (material) realities in agri-food technologies; and conflictual and constructive engagements in academia and agri-food. The introduction ends with a short reflection on future research trajectories in agri-food technoscience scholarship. (shrink)