Attend on Zoom: https://uio.zoom.us/j/65709551863?pwd=AGMV2H0mbWV1ZNCbLVJfFTR022GFyi.1
Abstract:
As with the field of epidemiological modelling more generally, food models mobilise huge quantities of data to make interlinking systems (health, metabolic, social, environmental, demographic etc.) tractable and actionable. Irrespective of their sophistication, however, these models create abstracted worlds that never fully match up to their real-world referent. This talk will present the findings of an empirical investigation into a hugely influential food system modelling exercise, the EAT-Lancet Commission, to explore the knowledge politics that emerge from these representation-reality gaps. It will focus, in particular, on the usage of data-intensive methods by those seeking to map out complex and global socio-ecological issues. The talk introduces new analytics to explore what happens when political, cultural, and scientific interest in the complex, interconnected, and planetary character of socio-environmental crisis encounters the epistemologies of data-intensive (though inherently finite) knowledge production. Building on the language of framing and overflowing, the talk explores why complexity and planetarity have become so alluring in science communication strategies, and it interrogates the political economy that determines which discrepancies between calculative model and material reality get to become controversial. It shows how the contestations the EAT-Lancet Report attracted arose, in part, because of conflicting understandings of complexity. Where the report depicted the food system as a romantic whole, those who criticised its findings did so by attesting to the food system’s baroque irreducibility and the pervasiveness of context. Critics challenged the report’s putative view-from-nowhere with their various views-from-somewhere. These contestations were frequently articulated through the language of justice: that the findings of the Report could not be considered actionable or reliable not because the science or calculations were erroneous, but because the production of the report was, in various ways, unjust.
Bio:
Dr George Cusworth is a Post-Doctoral Researcher on the Dynamic Territory project at the University of Oslo. His research focuses on food and agriculture, drawing on geography, political ecology, and STS literatures to understand how humans and nature are connected through agricultural landscapes. He studies how complex ecosystems are known through scientific and cultural representations and explores how the food system complicates traditional territorial approaches to social and environmental governance. Dr Cusworth´s current work focusses on metabolism and its emergence as a governmental logic of social and environmental remediation.