ABSTRACT
Scholarship flourishes in inclusive environments where open deliberations and generative feedback expand both individual and collective thinking. Many researchers, however, have limited access to such settings, and most conventional academic conferences fall short of promises to provide them. We have written this Field Report to share our methods for cultivating a vibrant intellectual community within the Science and Technology Studies Food and Agriculture Network (STSFAN). This is paired with insights from 21 network members on aspects that have allowed STSFAN to thrive, even amid a global pandemic. Our hope is that these insights will encourage others to cultivate their own intellectual communities, where they too can receive the support they need to deepen their scholarship and strengthen their intellectual relationships.
ABSTRACT
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.
ABSTRACT
In this review, we first assess the state of agricultural health and safety research as it pertains to the dynamic challenges facing automating agriculture on a warming planet. Then, we turn to social science fields such as rural sociology, science and technology studies, and environmental studies to leverage relevant insights on the introduction of new technologies, environmental risks, and associated workplace hazards. Increased rates of automation in agriculture alongside new risks associated with climate change create the need for anticipatory governance and adaptive research to study novel mechanisms of worker health and safety. The use of the PRISMA framework led to the 137 articles for our review. We identify three themes in the literature on agricultural health and safety: (1) adoption outcomes, (2) discrete cases of health risks, and (3) an emphasis on care and wellbeing in literature on dairy automation Our review led to the identification of research gaps, noting that current research (a) tends to examine these forces separately, instead of together, (b) has not made robust examination of these forces as socially embedded, and (c) has hesitated to examine the broad, transferable themes for how these forces work across industries. In response to these gaps, we suggest that attention to outside disciplines may provide agricultural health and safety research with a toolset to examine needed inquiry into the multiplicity of experiences of rural stakeholders, the industry specific problems arising from automation and climate change, and the socially embedded aspects of agricultural work in the future.
Subject(s)
Agriculture , Climate Change , Farms , Workplace , AutomationABSTRACT
Over the last 20 years, earth's increasing surface temperature has dramatically altered local climates and risks associated with agricultural work. In parallel, increasing automation has continued to be a hallmark of innovation in agriculture, promising to lower the economic and health externalities of labor in food production by reducing worker demand and hazardous exposure. However, many of these automations neither eliminate labor nor ameliorate climate change pressures on farms. As a result of the confluence between automation and environmental change, empirical studies into the social determinants of agricultural health and safety in rapidly automating industries impacted by local effects of climate change are essential for a responsive agricultural health and safety science. In this commentary, I suggest that looking outside of our disciplinary boundaries to the lessons learned from rural studies (RS), environmental social science (ESS), and science and technology studies (STS) can lend useful theoretical framing for the development of new research trajectories in the areas of automation and climate change as they impact agricultural health and safety.
