Vital Signs 2: Paper Session 6c
Linking micro and macro social worlds
Thursday 9 September, 11.30 - 1pm
'The Husbandry of Technology: 'Radical' technologies within the everyday context of the UK family farm' - Clare Perkins (University of Worcester)
Problems surrounding food security, environmental degradation and a growing world population have recently attracted significant attention. As one way of alleviating these problems, there have been calls to (re-) invigorate investment in technology. For example, recent influential recommendations [Chatham House Report, 2009] suggest that genetic modification (GM) might satisfy, sustainably, a growing world demand for food. These calls have the potential to construct a ‘new’ ‘neo-productivist’ agriculture [Ilbery & Maye, 2010].
‘Radical’ technologies, such as GM, have inspired considerations of the agricultural sector that are based on relatively large, lowland and economically stable farms. There is potential to understand family farm businesses, which illustrate the heterogeneity of the sector, but are also significant in terms of UK land ownership. Focusing on these farms encourages considerations of how technologies are woven through everyday farm practice.
Using ethnographic methods, the research on which this paper is based is concerned with the subjective experience of practical, lived and grounded engagements with technologies. It considers these observable engagements as manifestations of ‘knowledge-practice networks’ [Holloway & Morris, 2008]. Technologies have the potential to re-configure these networks, but these networks have the potential to re-configure technologies. This paper will outline a theoretical framework for the comparative analysis of these networks that is based on constitutions of ‘peripherality’. Drawing on social anthropology and agricultural geography, it bridges the ‘gap’ between the ‘global’ context of ‘radical’ technologies and the ‘everyday’ context of the ‘local’ farm. Interrogating ‘glocal’ articulations through ‘ethnography’, this paper imagines a changing agricultural landscape.
'Reversing the Abracadabra: Using photo-elicitation techniques to render the taken-for-granted visible' - Karen Parkhill, Dr Catherine Butler and Nick Pidgeon (Cardiff University)
In a context of contemporary policy discourses around climate change, energy security and affordability, energy consuming practices have increasingly come to be positioned as problematic. Resulting policy aims to reduce energy demand pose a complex set of challenges and questions for research. The utilisation of domestic energy has become an increasingly disembedded practice, dislocated from processes of production and consequences of consumption. Wider energy configurations are now largely divorced from our lived realities and instead, energy processes are unseen intangibles; deeply intertwined with our everyday lives but rarely forming the focus of conscious reflection. This research context poses important questions including - how as researchers can we investigate and make salient that which has been rendered mundane? Our project – a locality study across two case sites near to existing/proposed energy developments - used photo elicitation combined with reconvened in-depth interviews to examine energy as part of everyday life. By asking our participants (n=53) to take photographs of things they saw in their daily lives that prompted thoughts about energy, and then subsequently discuss them, we hoped to uncover the values, meanings and understandings they attached to their energy practices; encouraging reflexivity and engagement through more than one sensory mode. Our paper will focus on the images our participants took both in terms of their value as method and the analytic possibilities they opened up. Ultimately, we have found that using visuals in combination with interviews enriched our data and provided important means for engaging our participants with the kind of intangible that “energy” represents.
'And what if the sociological imagination was symmetrical? On the implications of an actor-network approach to qualitative and material complexities: The case of dairy milk' - Dr Richie Nimmo (University of Manchester)
Milk is a supremely mundane everyday commodity, yet it is also a deeply complex socio-material artefact, the product of an intricate history of interconnections between phenomena as diverse as cows, humans, technologies, diseases, forms of knowledge and expertise, soil and climate, war, economics and politics. This paper explores the implications of actor-network theory as an approach to reckoning with such heterogeneous realities. It shows how tracing the history of the modernisation of dairy milk involves tracing a network of connections between radically heterogeneous entities, rendering absurd any attempt to organise such knowledge in terms of separate categories of 'social' and 'natural', 'human' and 'nonhuman', as though these corresponded to separate ontological domains or 'levels' of reality. Instead, it argues, these domains are continually being brought into being by modern knowledge-practices, in the face of a lived reality in which the kinds of things they purport to classify are constitutively intermixed, and where everything takes place on the same 'level'. In this light, the paper reflects upon the possibilities of a 'sociological imagination' which proceeds by thinking such categories simultaneously, or, better, by imagining a reality which is not so divided.
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