ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Legitimating Agricultural Risk: Science, Bodies and Knowledge Across Global Farming

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

Farming in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has become increasingly defined by its dependence on pesticides and rapid technological innovation. Despite longstanding claims that these inputs reduce uncertainties associated with the risk of farming, scholars such as Julie Guthman, Annie Shattuck, and Jean-Noël Jouzel have made it clear that these practices also lead to abundant health problems and environmental degradation. In this panel, we propose to investigate how the dispossessive and toxic effects of these agricultural logics have been “encoded as agrarian best practices” (Brian Williams, 2021). Drawing on case studies from Kenya, Spain, Peru, and the United States, we will consider what strategies have been employed around the world to validate the risks associated with intensive and chemically-saturated agriculture.

The panel will explore this topic through the following questions:
• How do practices of legitimation make certain forms of bodily exposure appear acceptable or even necessary? How do these same practices marginalize Indigenous or local knowledge in defining agricultural risk?
• Who propagates these narratives of expertise and who benefits from them most directly?
• How might agricultural knowledge practices be altered by reconstituting our understanding of risk?

Panelists will employ a wide variety of methodological approaches to address the routes through which agricultural risks have become legitimated. From readings of agro-advertisements to interweaving analysis of soil science reports and oral history interviews to close analysis of photographs, each paper will illuminate how the articulation of locally-constituted thresholds of perceptibility are key to justifying these ongoing practices of intensive farming. In unpacking these varying strategies, the panel as a whole seeks to better understand the landscape of existing risk mitigation and the diverse forms of subjectivities and communities that are rendered through it.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Sam Hege, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Individual Presentations

• Living with Depletion: Whiteness, Masculinity, and the Making of a Visual Politics of Groundwater - Sam Hege, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

• Risk Beyond the Model: Multiscale Stories of Agrobiodiversity Loss in the Andes - Alejandra Osorio Tarazona, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

• Legitimisation of Pesticide Use Through Agro-Adverts on Radio and Television in Kenya - James Maina Wachira, Tharaka University

• When Bodies Remember What Documents Forget: Agricultural Risk and Epistemic Erasure in El Ejido - Silvia Pérez-Criado, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Session Organizer

• Silvia Pérez-Criado, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science