Standard Grant: Investigating the "Grand Challenge" Solutions of Agro-Food Technology

University Of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

The proposed research project focuses on the food-technology sector in the San Francisco Bay Area. It will examine the interests, principles, social relationships, and institutional forces that are guiding the sector as a whole within the region. The project will use multiple methods including database construction, network analysis, surveys of patents, observations of trade meetings, and interviews to shed light on how entrepreneurs are anticipating public resistance or support in the design and marketing of their products. The results of this project will have the potential to lead to reconsiderations of problem framing, product design and marketing. It may serve to encourage philanthropists and public institutions to invest in solutions most likely to be efficacious, equitable, and widely embraced. It may also serve to generate a more nuanced public engagement with these technologies that steer clear of the extremes of knee jerk rejection and uncritical celebration. This project will investigate a broad array of novel food, supply chain, and agricultural technologies. The aim of the project is to produce understanding of the challenges facing the agro-food system. It will examine the discursive frames and enabling assumptions that underpin technology deployment, and it will explore how these technologies are being shaped by institutional collaborations and in response to imagined publics. Specific research activities include constructing a database of existing and pipeline technologies, producing a social network analysis of influences and connections, observing the self-representations of both the sector and individual products at industry trade meetings and other events, and interviewing a broad array of entrepreneurs and collaborating scientists and funders. By subjecting the assumptions and promises of a broad array of novel technologies to robust social analysis and sharing the results with the industry and its champions, this project will help technology entrepreneurs and their collaborators to acquire a better understanding of the nature of their own interventions, how they align with their own stated aims, and the underlying issues that might inform public perception and resistance to the disruptions they propose. 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.