Landscapes of Knowledge: Stories of Agricultural Science and Technology

This panel brings together anthropologists and historians of science and technology to explore how agricultural landscapes are (being) remade through diverse ways of knowing. The 21st century brings with it a brave new world of biotechnology, robotics, genetic engineering, microbial research, precision agriculture, and data science. With these advances new research methods and models emerge, informing and informed by the shifting knowledges of agricultural practice. But the new is cultivated in, of, or against the old. This panel critically queries these historical and emerging landscapes of knowledge, asking how sedimented infrastructures of agricultural science and technology are influencing the present and being reimagined for alternative agrarian futures. Papers in this panel offer diverse vantagepoints examining the digitization of the Dutch dairy industry, the translation of microbial knowledge from lab to farm, Goethean science and alternative agriculture in the US, and high-tech greenhouses in the Spanish desert. The models science and agriculture use to think with matter, framing what methods of knowing the world are possible and thus what material realities are made. This panel contributes to a growing interest in the future(s) of food production by locating it in the past, and by highlighting its entanglements with knowledge regimes, care practices, animal and human health, and the biopolitics of emerging technology.