Research addressing the challenges emerging from the development and diffusion of digital technologies has grown rapidly in recent years. However, much of this literature tends to overlook the immersion of these technologies into our everyday lives. This everyday digitalization cannot be reduced to specific technological innovations and is obviously a crucial aspect of the social changes introduced by digital technologies. This themed issue sets out to explore the everyday dimension of digitalization, in the specific context of agri-food systems. We propose (...) a collection of papers that contribute to opening new approaches to digitalization in food and agriculture, by concentrating the attention on the mundane and ordinary aspects of digitalization and exploring their potential contributions to profound transformations in agri-food systems. The various forms of everyday digitalization that are presented in this symposium offer two particular ways of critically engaging with the digitalization of agriculture and food. Firstly, our everyday digitalization looks beyond examining the impacts of digitalization and positioning digital technologies in opposition to farmers, consumers, government, or other actors. Secondly, we shed light on the politics of uncertainty, which enables us to make anticipatory actions and see things beyond success and failure. What we observe is how these imaginaries participate in the co-production of digital realities through their encounter with the complexity of everyday life. Therefore, it remains essential to engage critically with both the imaginary and the everyday dimensions of digitalization in their multiplicity. (shrink)

Narratives inform policymaking by building consensus, stabilizing our shared beliefs, and legitimizing our assumptions (Roe 1992, 1994). This research applies narrative policy analysis to identify and compare the dominant agriculture and food (agri-food) narratives of Canadian federal government and civil society policy over time. It aims to understand and compare what narratives are driving the agri-food policy priorities of each group, with particular attention to how policy narratives address social and environmental goals. This analysis documents and confirms a Neoliberal Techno-optimist (...) Growth Narrative as the dominant narrative in federal Canadian Agriculture and Agri-food Canada (AAFC) policy between 1986 and 2019. Over a similar period, civil society has adopted narratives that prioritize localization and democratization of the food system as well as food security. While the neoliberal priorities of market expansion and competitiveness are the focus within federal narratives, civil society concerns related to the social and environmental costs of economic efficiency, including reduced farmer livelihoods, environmental degradation, and loss of community decision-making capacity, have received marginal attention from federal policy. We discuss how the Neoliberal Techno-optimist Growth Narrative imposes structural barriers on the pursuit of environmental and social goals by establishing a hierarchy of goals whereby environmental/social goals can only be pursued to the extent that they contribute to economic growth and by promoting a techno-optimist approach. As such, the dominant Neoliberal Techno-optimist Growth Narrative stabilizes two contested assumptions: (1) economic growth through liberalized trade is the best approach to achieve societal wellbeing, and (2) that technological innovation will sufficiently address environmental pressures. (shrink)

An emerging discourse about automated agricultural machinery imagines farms as places where farmers and workers do not need to be, but also implicitly frames farms as intolerable places where people do not want to be. Only autonomous machines, this story goes, can relieve farmers and workers of this presumed burden by letting them ‘farm at a distance’. In return for this distanced autonomy, farmers are promised increased control over their work-life balance and greater farm productivity from letting ‘smart’ robots assume (...) control over the operational environment. Drawing upon the ways that these machines are promoted by manufacturers in various media, we trace the nascent contours of what we term a liberatory sociotechnical imaginary for agricultural automation across three cases—automated milking systems, self-driving tractors, and robotic strawberry pickers. We show how promises for new freedoms and autonomy are flexibly deployed to respond to distinct frictions that farmers, workers, and even farm animals experience in different modes of industrial agriculture. However, underlying these promises is the purposefully understated self-interest of manufacturers, who stand to gain further control over farms if automated technologies assume a central role in agriculture. Through the liberatory rhetoric, we contend, the imaginary seeks to enroll farmers into a socio-technical network that creates new relations of dependence upon the companies who design, sell, maintain, and often retain ownership over automated technologies. While potentially powerful, this imaginary may nonetheless fail to coalesce as farmers, workers, and agroecosystems exert their own agency on automated imaginaries and technological futures for agriculture. (shrink)