Emergent Imaginaries of Regenerative Agriculture

这个项目考察了旨在改善土壤健康的实践的相互竞争的愿景，称为再生农业。该项目将专注于最近在大平原和新英格兰发起的一系列由公司赞助的土壤健康和碳农业倡议，这两个地区都有成熟的再生农业运动。该项目从不同的利益相关者--农民、公司、科学家和社区成员--的角度出发，旨在了解他们对再生农业的愿景如何影响实地实践和关于美国农业的未来及其在应对气候变化中的作用的更广泛的辩论。该项目的发现将通过学术和公共渠道广泛传播，并将引起农业决策者、农业从业者、公司、研究人员和社区成员的兴趣。该项目的前提是，可再生农业的相互竞争的愿景可以理解为新出现的社会技术想象。该项目将采用半结构化访谈、参与者观察和文件分析来审查a)这些新出现的想象力的来源，b)它们如何影响正在进行的再生农业倡议，c)这些倡议如何评估进展，以及d)农民和其他主要公众如何看待和体验这些倡议。从概念上讲，该项目将通过吸收社会科学家对人类-土壤关系的分析以及从农业研究学术中获得的见解，丰富社会技术想象的框架。它将展示这些想象如何借鉴和告知人们工作的方式，以及以其他方式体验比人类更多的世界。它还将考虑殖民者殖民主义和资本主义的更大历史如何塑造令人向往的农业未来的愿景。因此，该项目将提请注意，实现和扩大这种愿景的努力可以如何建立在先前的规模扩大项目的基础上，并有可能复制这些项目。从经验上讲，该项目将进行企业再生农业倡议的第一次研究。因此，它将推动农业食品研究和公司治理学术研究。通过审查最近启动的企业项目和先前存在的运动，该项目还将为科学和技术研究奖学金带来正在形成的社会技术想象力的更全面的图景。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project examines the competing visions of practices aimed at improving soil health, called regenerative agriculture. This project will focus on a set of recently launched company-sponsored soil health and carbon farming initiatives in the Great Plains and New England, both regions with well-established regenerative agriculture movements. Drawing on the perspectives of diverse stakeholders – farmers, companies, scientists, and community members – the project aims to understand how their visions of regenerative farming shape both on-the-ground practices and broader debates about the future of U.S. agriculture and its role in addressing climate change. The project’s findings will be widely disseminated through both scholarly and public channels, and will be of interest to agricultural decision makers, agricultural practitioners, companies, researchers, and community members.The project starts from the premise that competing visions of regenerative agriculture can be understood as emergent sociotechnical imaginaries. This project will employ semi-structured interviews, participant observation and document analysis to examine a) the origins of these emergent imaginaries, b) how they shape ongoing regenerative agriculture initiatives; c) how these initiatives evaluate progress, and d) how farmers and other key publics view and experience those initiatives. Conceptually, the project will enrich the framework of sociotechnical imaginaries by incorporating insights from social scientists’ analyses of human-soil relations as well as from agrarian studies scholarship. It will show how these imaginaries both draw on and inform the ways that people work with and otherwise experience the more-than-human world. It will also consider how visions of desirable agrarian futures are shaped by larger histories of settler colonialism and capitalism. The project will thus call attention to how efforts to realize and scale up such visions may build upon and potentially replicate prior scale-making projects. Empirically, this project will undertake the first study of corporate regenerative agriculture initiatives. It will thus advance agri-food studies and corporate governance scholarship. By examining recently launched corporate projects in tandem with pre-existing movements, the project will also bring to Science and Technology Studies scholarship a fuller picture of sociotechnical imaginaries in-the-making.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.