The term ‘food security’ has been used in multiple ways and addresses not only issues around availability and accessibility of foods, but also, among others, the sustainability of livelihoods at the local community level—an issue often seen as a basis for the proliferation of local and alternative food networks. Accordingly, in this paper we attempt to develop a theoretical re-framing that is able to link food security with AFNs in arguing that the understanding of the two notions is dynamics and (...) contingent upon the elements that construct them. We use an assemblage approach to analyze a case of Dunedin, a small-size city in New Zealand, in which the community aims to achieve food security through a local food strategy. Through a series of interviews with a group of food activists and academics, public discussions, and two local food forums, we found that food security was understood and performed in its local context through assembling diverse actors and objectives within the AFN. In conclusion, we offer assemblage thinking as an analytical tool to understand how seemingly precarious local food relations are stabilized and assembled so as to open possibilities of achieving food security. (shrink)

This paper contributes to our understanding of farm data value chains with assistance from 54 semi-structured interviews and field notes from participant observations. Methodologically, it includes individuals, such as farmers, who hold well-known positionalities within digital agriculture spaces—platforms that include precision farming techniques, farm equipment built on machine learning architecture and algorithms, and robotics—while also including less visible elements and practices. The actors interviewed and materialities and performances observed thus came from spaces and places inhabited by, for example, farmers, crop (...) scientists, statisticians, programmers, and senior leadership in firms located in the U.S. and Canada. The stability of “the” artifacts followed for this project proved challenging, which led to me rethinking how to approach the subject conceptually. The paper is animated by a posthumanist commitment, drawing heavily from assemblage thinking and critical data scholarship coming out of Science and Technology Studies. The argument’s understanding of “chains” therefore lies on an alternative conceptual plane relative to most commodity chain scholarship. To speak of a data value chain is to foreground an orchestrating set of relations among humans, non-humans, products, spaces, places, and practices. The paper’s principle contribution involves interrogating lock-in tendencies at different “points” along the digital farm platform assemblage while pushing for a varied understanding of governance depending on the roles of the actors and actants involved. (shrink)