What is agriculture for, and how should we do it better?
- There are several conceptual approaches (or “archetypes”) for prioritizing and justifying technologically instigated change in food systems, but how do we know which are best and for what purposes?
- How are ethical dimensions of new agricultural and food technologies including biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, Big Data and AI best addressed?
This project explores how these archetypes can inform or improve current social science research on agricultural or food technology and system change. The project includes a planning objective that includes farming in several rural and urban communities with different positionalities. Ethics is interpreted as the explicit statement and subsequent justificatory logic of priority setting criteria for technological innovations in the food sector. Interpretive methods from philosophical ethics will be applied to this task, but in a manner that is specific to the mindset and behavior of food system actors.
Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI)/ National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA)/ United States Department of Agriculture (USDA): Grant #2023-67023-40127. https://portal.nifa.usda.gov/lmd4/recent_awards?report_title=Recent%20Awards&from_site=NIFA&search_label=Awards%20Listing