Speaker: Kelly Bronson, University of Ottawa, Canada

Did you know that agribusinesses increasingly trade in big data just like Facebook, Google and Amazon? In this talk, Dr Kelly Bronson will argue that agricultural data are participating in the reproduction of inequity and environmental harm that characterizes our global food system.

Focusing on the intersections between big data systems and food, Dr. Bronson will develop a closely observed account of farmer “hacktivists” who are attempting to use digitization to contest industrial agriculture. Drawing from years of fieldwork with farmers and data scientists, Dr Bronson will also detail the magical qualities that activists and agribusinesses alike invest in big-data systems. Ultimately, the talk will explore what happens to food sovereignty when emergent agri-tech gets caught up in pre-existing arrangements of power.

Kelly Bronson is a Canada Research Chair in Science and Society at the University of Ottawa in Canada. She is a social scientist studying and helping to mitigate science-society tensions that erupt around controversial technologies and their governance—from GMOs to big data. Her research uses qualitative and innovative methods to bring rights holder needs and concerns into the design and governance of emergent and controversial technologies and aims to bring community values and non-technical knowledge into conversation with technical in the production of evidence-based decision-making. She has published her work in regional (Journal of New Brunswick Studies), national (Canadian Journal of Communication) and international journals (Journal of Responsible Innovation, Big Data and Society).