1. ‘You can't eat data’?: Moving beyond the misconfigured innovations of smart farming
- Collection:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center (ACDC)
- Contributers:
- Fraser, Alistair (author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- 2021-06-17
- Published:
- Netherlands: Elsevier
- Location:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 206 Document Number: D12812
- Journal Title:
- Journal of Rural Studies
- Journal Title Details:
- Volume 91, Pages 200 - 207
- Notes:
- 8pgs, This paper presents a critical examination of smart farming. I follow other critical analyses in recognizing the centrality of innovation processes in generating smart farming products, services, arrangements, and problematic outcomes. I subsequently use insights from critical human geography scholarship on the significance of understanding topological transformations to move beyond interpretations that identify only a narrow range of smart farming problems, such as a lack of coordination or limited uptake by farmers. Instead, I examine a broader set of challenges produced by smart farming developments. The overriding concern, I argue, is that smart farming unfolds via the production of numerous ‘misconfigured innovations.’ Using insights from literature on responsible research and innovation I then probe the stakes of looking beyond the misconfigured innovations of smart farming and discuss how new technologies might come to play a role in producing emancipatory smart farming. I pay attention to research on the ‘internet of people,’ which paints a stark new picture of social life generally, and in particular how rural life might be computed and calculated according to new conceptualizations of sociality and spatiality.