Kelly Bronson
Biographic Data
| ID | 296570 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kelly Bronson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kelly |
| FAMILY NAME | Bronson |
| SIGNATURE | BRONSON K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Ottawa |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5365-4919 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 135 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Enablers, barriers, and future considerations for living lab effectiveness in environmental and agricultural sustainability transitions
Living labs are promoted as an effective open innovation approach that accelerates the adoption of innovations. However, there remain knowledge gaps about factors that influence their effectiveness, success, and application to sustainability transitions. Through a scoping review on the evaluation of living labs, we identified 43 enablers and 37 barriers to effectiveness and success of living labs organised around the themes of governance, process…
Against ‘technology adoption’
How do small-scale farmers ‘adopt’ digital agriculture technologies, what is their use for diversified farming, and how do they position themselves vis-à-vis the seemingly inevitable era of ‘Agriculture 4.0’? This paper discusses results from the research project Diversity by Design to ponder how small-scale, biodiverse farmers in Ontario and Quebec, Canada, relate to digital agriculture and farming tools even though and exactly because these tec…
Harvesting value
The global food system is characterized by market concentration and oligopoly. In our article, we focus on the most powerful input supply and machinery companies and analyze how these firms create value, both economic and otherwise, from big data. In digital capitalism, data is valorized across sectors; personal data is aggregated into large-scale datasets, a practice that feeds economic concentration and monopolization. Big data also has become …
Contested agri-food futures
Over recent decades, influential agri-food tech actors, institutions, policymakers and others have fostered dominant techno-optimistic, future visions of food and agriculture that are having profound material impacts in present agri-food worlds. Analyzing such realities has become paramount for scholars working across the fields of science and technology studies (STS) and critical agri-food studies, many of whom contribute to STSFAN—the Science a…
Cultivating intellectual community in academia
Scholarship flourishes in inclusive environments where open deliberations and generative feedback expand both individual and collective thinking. Many researchers, however, have limited access to such settings, and most conventional academic conferences fall short of promises to provide them. We have written this Field Report to share our methods for cultivating a vibrant intellectual community within the Science and Technology Studies Food and A…
Social science – STEM collaborations in agriculture, food and beyond
Interdisciplinary research needs innovation. As an action-oriented intervention, this Manifesto begins from the authors' experiences as social scientists working within interdisciplinary science and technology collaborations in agriculture and food. We draw from these experiences to: 1) explain what social scientists contribute to interdisciplinary agri-food tech collaborations; (2) describe barriers to substantive and meaningful collaboration; a…
Consent’ as epistemic recognition
This article unpacks the logic of the equivalence invoked by the Government of Canada between Indigenous consent and the inclusion of Indigenous peoples and knowledges in impact assessment. We situate the logic within the politics of recognition in Canada-a politics that aims to shore up national unity in the face of regular challenges to it. We use the Canadian results from a recent scoping review on conceptions of environmental justice in impac…
Clicks and particulates
Critiques of data colonialism and surveillance capitalism focus on data collected from online behavior. We propose that analytical concepts from these critiques-namely, regimes of value and patterns of alienation and attunement-could be applied more widely to better understand the threats that datafication poses to equity and democracy in the social and environmental realms. Regimes of value, which include the institutions and technologies that m…
The Immaculate Conception of Data
Big Tech Meets Big Ag
Big Tech
Rethinking gender mainstreaming in agricultural innovation policy in Nepal
A call to expand disciplinary boundaries so that social scientific imagination and practice are central to quests for 'responsible' digital agri-food innovation
This editorial introduces a special issue (SI) concerning quests for responsible digital agri-food innovation. We present our interpretations of the concepts of responsible innovation and digital agri-food innovation and show why they can and have been productively interrelated with social science theories and methods. First, each of the articles in this SI is briefly introduced and synthesised around three themes: (1) the need for a critique of …
Disciplining land through data
Digital agricultural technologies are promoted for increasing productivity, environmental sustainability and transparency in farming. Critical perspectives on digital agriculture are necessary to frame opportunities and challenges for agricultural communities. However, the ways in which digital agricultural technologies are contributing to land financialisation-bringing land into the global market exchange-remains unexplored. Historically, farmla…
Beyond distribution and participation
Vulnerable
The future(s) of digital agriculture and sustainable food systems
Looking through a responsible innovation lens at uneven engagements with digital farming
This article extends social science research on big data and data platforms through a focus on agriculture, which has received relatively less attention than other sectors like health. In this paper, I use a responsible innovation framework to move attention to the social and ethical dimensions of big data “upstream,” to decision-making in the very selection of agricultural data and the building of its infrastructures. I draw on original empirica…
The Digital Divide and How It Matters for Canadian Food System Equity
Policy discussions have raised concerns about how big data are used and who has knowledge about the ways in which they are used. These discussions, however, have largely ignored the role that digitization plays in agriculture. Consequently, the digitization of agriculture is unfolding with very little regulatory intervention. Drawing on ongoing research, this article argues that this omission may be critical, and suggests how it can be considered…
The Canadian family farm, in literature and in practice
Fracking in Canadian Print News
It is widely recognized that fracking is a topic of debate in the news, which is largely “compartmentalized” into stories on fracking as economically beneficial or risky to environment and health. Building on previous scholarship, we take a constructivist position and focus on fracking as potentially technical and social, or sociotechnical. Our qualitative textual analysis of news printed in two high-circulation newspapers in Canada (2013-2015) r…
Smart Farming
IntroductionThis article begins from the foundational premise that values are endemic to innovation. This premise goes against the dominant view in which innovation design (and to a certain extent governance) is seen as highly technical and objective work that addresses a narrow set of practical problems. Innovations not only solve design problems but they also reorder
Big Data in food and agriculture
Farming is undergoing a digital revolution. Our existing review of current Big Data applications in the agri-food sector has revealed several collection and analytics tools that may have implications for relationships of power between players in the food system (e.g. between farmers and large corporations). For example, Who retains ownership of the data generated by applications like Monsanto Corproation's Weed I.D. "app"? Are there privacy impli…
Responsible to whom? Seed innovations and the corporatization of agriculture
In this paper, I use historical description to trace the processes by which hybrid seed innovations and their successors – genetically engineered (GE) seed systems – were co-produced with a techno-scientific infrastructure favoring chemical corporations and productivist farming at the expense of small farmers and alternative ways of organizing rural life. Using a discourse analysis method, I also shed light on why historical shifts in seed innova…
Reflecting on the Science in Science Communication
Science communication is often understood as the transmission of facts to ignorant audiences. Science and Technology Studies allows a different perspective on science—as open to negotiation with other knowledges and institutions—and therefore a different perspective on its communication. Within an STS perspective, what counts as scientific fact or legitimate expertise takes shape within communicative acts. This article demonstrates the analytical…
Big Data in food and agriculture
Farming is undergoing a digital revolution. Our existing review of current Big Data applications in the agri-food sector has revealed several collection and analytics tools that may have implications for relationships of power between players in the food system (e.g. between farmers and large corporations). For example, Who retains ownership of the data generated by applications like Monsanto Corproation's Weed I.D. "app"? Are there privacy impli…
Big Tech
Big Tech Meets Big Ag
Contested agri-food futures
Over recent decades, influential agri-food tech actors, institutions, policymakers and others have fostered dominant techno-optimistic, future visions of food and agriculture that are having profound material impacts in present agri-food worlds. Analyzing such realities has become paramount for scholars working across the fields of science and technology studies (STS) and critical agri-food studies, many of whom contribute to STSFAN—the Science a…
Disciplining land through data
Digital agricultural technologies are promoted for increasing productivity, environmental sustainability and transparency in farming. Critical perspectives on digital agriculture are necessary to frame opportunities and challenges for agricultural communities. However, the ways in which digital agricultural technologies are contributing to land financialisation-bringing land into the global market exchange-remains unexplored. Historically, farmla…
Harvesting value
The global food system is characterized by market concentration and oligopoly. In our article, we focus on the most powerful input supply and machinery companies and analyze how these firms create value, both economic and otherwise, from big data. In digital capitalism, data is valorized across sectors; personal data is aggregated into large-scale datasets, a practice that feeds economic concentration and monopolization. Big data also has become …
Rethinking gender mainstreaming in agricultural innovation policy in Nepal
A call to expand disciplinary boundaries so that social scientific imagination and practice are central to quests for 'responsible' digital agri-food innovation
This editorial introduces a special issue (SI) concerning quests for responsible digital agri-food innovation. We present our interpretations of the concepts of responsible innovation and digital agri-food innovation and show why they can and have been productively interrelated with social science theories and methods. First, each of the articles in this SI is briefly introduced and synthesised around three themes: (1) the need for a critique of …
The Canadian family farm, in literature and in practice
Social science – STEM collaborations in agriculture, food and beyond
Interdisciplinary research needs innovation. As an action-oriented intervention, this Manifesto begins from the authors' experiences as social scientists working within interdisciplinary science and technology collaborations in agriculture and food. We draw from these experiences to: 1) explain what social scientists contribute to interdisciplinary agri-food tech collaborations; (2) describe barriers to substantive and meaningful collaboration; a…
Clicks and particulates
Critiques of data colonialism and surveillance capitalism focus on data collected from online behavior. We propose that analytical concepts from these critiques-namely, regimes of value and patterns of alienation and attunement-could be applied more widely to better understand the threats that datafication poses to equity and democracy in the social and environmental realms. Regimes of value, which include the institutions and technologies that m…
Cultivating intellectual community in academia
Scholarship flourishes in inclusive environments where open deliberations and generative feedback expand both individual and collective thinking. Many researchers, however, have limited access to such settings, and most conventional academic conferences fall short of promises to provide them. We have written this Field Report to share our methods for cultivating a vibrant intellectual community within the Science and Technology Studies Food and A…
Consent’ as epistemic recognition
This article unpacks the logic of the equivalence invoked by the Government of Canada between Indigenous consent and the inclusion of Indigenous peoples and knowledges in impact assessment. We situate the logic within the politics of recognition in Canada-a politics that aims to shore up national unity in the face of regular challenges to it. We use the Canadian results from a recent scoping review on conceptions of environmental justice in impac…
Fracking in Canadian Print News
It is widely recognized that fracking is a topic of debate in the news, which is largely “compartmentalized” into stories on fracking as economically beneficial or risky to environment and health. Building on previous scholarship, we take a constructivist position and focus on fracking as potentially technical and social, or sociotechnical. Our qualitative textual analysis of news printed in two high-circulation newspapers in Canada (2013-2015) r…
Technology and Values – or Technological Values
Technology and Values: Essential Readings, Edited by Craig Hanks, Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, 542 pp., $120.95 In his editor's introduction, Craig Hanks lays out a grounding problematic for
Reflecting on the Science in Science Communication
Science communication is often understood as the transmission of facts to ignorant audiences. Science and Technology Studies allows a different perspective on science—as open to negotiation with other knowledges and institutions—and therefore a different perspective on its communication. Within an STS perspective, what counts as scientific fact or legitimate expertise takes shape within communicative acts. This article demonstrates the analytical…
The Shaping of Science in Biotechnology Conflicts
Will C. van den Hoonaard, Map Worlds
Responsible to whom? Seed innovations and the corporatization of agriculture
In this paper, I use historical description to trace the processes by which hybrid seed innovations and their successors – genetically engineered (GE) seed systems – were co-produced with a techno-scientific infrastructure favoring chemical corporations and productivist farming at the expense of small farmers and alternative ways of organizing rural life. Using a discourse analysis method, I also shed light on why historical shifts in seed innova…
Big Data in food and agriculture
Farming is undergoing a digital revolution. Our existing review of current Big Data applications in the agri-food sector has revealed several collection and analytics tools that may have implications for relationships of power between players in the food system (e.g. between farmers and large corporations). For example, Who retains ownership of the data generated by applications like Monsanto Corproation's Weed I.D. "app"? Are there privacy impli…
Smart Farming
IntroductionThis article begins from the foundational premise that values are endemic to innovation. This premise goes against the dominant view in which innovation design (and to a certain extent governance) is seen as highly technical and objective work that addresses a narrow set of practical problems. Innovations not only solve design problems but they also reorder
Looking through a responsible innovation lens at uneven engagements with digital farming
This article extends social science research on big data and data platforms through a focus on agriculture, which has received relatively less attention than other sectors like health. In this paper, I use a responsible innovation framework to move attention to the social and ethical dimensions of big data “upstream,” to decision-making in the very selection of agricultural data and the building of its infrastructures. I draw on original empirica…
The Digital Divide and How It Matters for Canadian Food System Equity
Policy discussions have raised concerns about how big data are used and who has knowledge about the ways in which they are used. These discussions, however, have largely ignored the role that digitization plays in agriculture. Consequently, the digitization of agriculture is unfolding with very little regulatory intervention. Drawing on ongoing research, this article argues that this omission may be critical, and suggests how it can be considered…
The Canadian family farm, in literature and in practice
Fracking in Canadian Print News
It is widely recognized that fracking is a topic of debate in the news, which is largely “compartmentalized” into stories on fracking as economically beneficial or risky to environment and health. Building on previous scholarship, we take a constructivist position and focus on fracking as potentially technical and social, or sociotechnical. Our qualitative textual analysis of news printed in two high-circulation newspapers in Canada (2013-2015) r…
Vulnerable
The future(s) of digital agriculture and sustainable food systems
Beyond distribution and participation
The Immaculate Conception of Data
Big Tech Meets Big Ag
Big Tech
Rethinking gender mainstreaming in agricultural innovation policy in Nepal
A call to expand disciplinary boundaries so that social scientific imagination and practice are central to quests for 'responsible' digital agri-food innovation
This editorial introduces a special issue (SI) concerning quests for responsible digital agri-food innovation. We present our interpretations of the concepts of responsible innovation and digital agri-food innovation and show why they can and have been productively interrelated with social science theories and methods. First, each of the articles in this SI is briefly introduced and synthesised around three themes: (1) the need for a critique of …
Disciplining land through data
Digital agricultural technologies are promoted for increasing productivity, environmental sustainability and transparency in farming. Critical perspectives on digital agriculture are necessary to frame opportunities and challenges for agricultural communities. However, the ways in which digital agricultural technologies are contributing to land financialisation-bringing land into the global market exchange-remains unexplored. Historically, farmla…
Contested agri-food futures
Over recent decades, influential agri-food tech actors, institutions, policymakers and others have fostered dominant techno-optimistic, future visions of food and agriculture that are having profound material impacts in present agri-food worlds. Analyzing such realities has become paramount for scholars working across the fields of science and technology studies (STS) and critical agri-food studies, many of whom contribute to STSFAN—the Science a…
Cultivating intellectual community in academia
Scholarship flourishes in inclusive environments where open deliberations and generative feedback expand both individual and collective thinking. Many researchers, however, have limited access to such settings, and most conventional academic conferences fall short of promises to provide them. We have written this Field Report to share our methods for cultivating a vibrant intellectual community within the Science and Technology Studies Food and A…
Social science – STEM collaborations in agriculture, food and beyond
Interdisciplinary research needs innovation. As an action-oriented intervention, this Manifesto begins from the authors' experiences as social scientists working within interdisciplinary science and technology collaborations in agriculture and food. We draw from these experiences to: 1) explain what social scientists contribute to interdisciplinary agri-food tech collaborations; (2) describe barriers to substantive and meaningful collaboration; a…
Consent’ as epistemic recognition
This article unpacks the logic of the equivalence invoked by the Government of Canada between Indigenous consent and the inclusion of Indigenous peoples and knowledges in impact assessment. We situate the logic within the politics of recognition in Canada-a politics that aims to shore up national unity in the face of regular challenges to it. We use the Canadian results from a recent scoping review on conceptions of environmental justice in impac…
Clicks and particulates
Critiques of data colonialism and surveillance capitalism focus on data collected from online behavior. We propose that analytical concepts from these critiques-namely, regimes of value and patterns of alienation and attunement-could be applied more widely to better understand the threats that datafication poses to equity and democracy in the social and environmental realms. Regimes of value, which include the institutions and technologies that m…
Sociology (19 works) · Political science (15 works) · Agriculture (14 works) · Geography (10 works) · Business (9 works) · Economics (9 works) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (8 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Engineering (7 works)