How do categories work and what do they tell us about agricultural knowledge and farming practices?
How do categories fix the boundaries of what can be known and how things ought to be done in agriculture?
Categories stipulate standards of research conduct. In what ways do they shape the practices of plant and animal food production which link scientific activity to goals such as higher yields, soil health, food justice, and the welfare of livestock in intensive production systems?
Agricultural science is a particularly apt focus of study because social norms such as farm productivity, environmental quality and the economic competitiveness of farmers have long been explicitly recognized as values that influence the content and methods in agronomy, horticulture, animal science, and related fields. This collaborative project conjoins two activities in parallel. It conducts a detailed philosophical analysis of categories in several case studies of agricultural science, including soil systems, plant-soil interactions, biotech innovations in plant breeding, and farm management strategies directed to soil health identifying categorical classification or methods that proved decisive in steering the direction of research, or its subsequent application. The project serves as a study aimed to provide a clear model for one of the ways that socio-economic and ethico-political values interact with biologically-oriented scientific understanding at the basic level of their fundamental conceptual categories.
NSF Science and Technology Studies. Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science. NSF Grant #2240749 https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2240749&HistoricalAwards=false
For more on the first workshop see here