Members
STSFAN has over 150 members that are international scholars from all different stages in their careers. Members vary from early-career graduate students to scholars who have been working in their respective fields for decades. STSFAN members have many different scholarly specialties, yet have a similar intellectual interest in Science and Technology Studies approaches to agri-food. Some of STSFAN's current members are listed below:
Charlotte Biltekoff
Charlotte Biltekoff is Associate Professor of American Studies and Food Science and Technology at the University of California Davis, where she builds bridges between scientific and cultural approaches to questions about food and health. She is most interested in where ideas about “good” and “bad” food come from, the social and cultural roles they play, and their political stakes. She is author of Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health (Duke University Press, 2013), an exploration of the social and cultural dimensions of dietary advice and the changing meaning of “eating right” over the last century. Currently, she is working on a book about the role of scientific authority in the relationship between Big Food and its public, particularly around the question of whether processed food is a problem or a solution. She is co-PI on the AFTeR Project, a multidisciplinary research project across 3 UC campuses examining the Bay Area Agri-Food Tech sector. Funded by NSF, the project produces understanding of the interests, principles, rhetoric, social relationships and institutional forces that are guiding the sector as a whole. Biltekoff has published work in academic journals that span a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary terrain, and has made cross-disciplinary collaboration a core facet of her research, teaching and service efforts. At UC Davis she teaches classes on food and culture, as well as innovation in the food system. She is a big fan of STSFAN!
Website: http://www.charlottebiltekoff.com/
Samara Brock
Samara Brock is currently pursuing her PhD at Yale’s School of the Environment. She has spent more than 20 years working on food systems issues. She worked on agriculture projects in Cuba and Argentina, as a food systems planner for the City of Vancouver, and as a Program Officer for the Tides Canada Foundation funding non-profits working on complex conservation, climate change, and food system initiatives. As part of a collaboration between Oxford University, Wageningen, and the Swedish University of Agricultural Science, she co-hosts the Feed podcast focused on critical food system debates. Her current research focuses on networks of experts that have emerged since the 2008 food crisis who are attempting to shape the future of global food systems. She examines how expertise is co-produced within these networks and the communities they seek to represent, how this expertise is entangled with different conceptual food system models, and the factors that lead food system actors to propose such contrasting visions for the future.
Garrett Broad
Garrett Broad is an Associate Professor in Rowan University's College of Communication and Creative Arts, and a member of the university's Catalysts for Sustainability initiative. His research and teaching focus on contemporary social movements, digital media technologies, and the food system. He is the author of More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change, as well as a variety of articles on food's relationship to environmental sustainability, economic equity, and the health of humans and nonhuman animals. An engaged scholar, Professor Broad writes for both academic and public audiences, and works to develop collaborative research projects with a variety of social change-focused organizations.
Kelly Bronson
I hold a Canada Research Chair in Science and Society in Sociology at University of Ottawa with close affiliation to the Institute for Science, Society and Society (ISSP.uottawa.ca). I study and intervene into science-society tensions that erupt around technologies–GMOs, fracking, big data & AI—and their governance. I aim to bring community values into conversation with technical knowledge in the production of evidence-informed decision-making. My policy experience involves advising government and serving on expert panel committees like the Council of Canadian Academies (link to report). I have been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as a wide variety of private foundations. I have published my work in regional (Journal of New Brunswick Studies), national (Canadian Journal of Communication) and international journals (Science Communication, Journal of Responsible Innovation, Big Data and Society) and frequently get called on to mobilize my findings in public settings from Café Scientifique to mainstream media like TVO’s The Agenda.
Before joining the University of Ottawa, I was the Director of a Science and Technology Studies program at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada. Before that I received a PhD from Communication and Cultural Studies from York University, Toronto, as well as a Master’s degree in Sociology of Technology from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. Before my training in the social sciences, I earned degrees in biology and worked as a lab bench scientist practicing genetics/plant biology (Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada).
Karly Burch
Dr Karly Burch is a research fellow at the University of Otago’s Centre for Sustainability. She specializes in feminist and anticolonial science and technology studies (STS), ethnographic methods and collaborative research strategies, and her research agenda addresses questions of social and environmental justice related to health, food and technology (in both disaster and design). Her current research projects explore the material politics of nuclear pollution, artificially intelligent robotics in agriculture and collaborative research for sustainable technofutures. You can learn more about Karly and her research at www.karlyburch.com.
Benjamin Cohen
Benjamin Cohen is a historian of science, technology, and the environment and STS-trained scholar at Lafayette College in Easton, PA. He teaches courses on the cultural foundations of technology and engineering, the relationships between technology and nature, histories of technology, and food studies. He also helps advise the College’s student farm, while working with students, colleagues, and community members on food justice projects that grow from deep historical context. He is the author more recently of Pure Adulteration: Cheating on Nature in the Age of Manufactured Food (Chicago, 2019/2022) and co-editor with Michael Kideckel and Anna Zeide of Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food (MIT, 2021). You can learn more about his work and public writing at brcohen.net.
Matthew Comi
Matt Comi’s research program focuses on the social dimensions of environmental and technological change as examined through food and agriculture. His current projects include examining how digital agriculture technologies impact farmer autonomy in the corn and soy industry, how farmer-driven innovations in hop growing impact community and environmental sustainability, and how automation and climate change in labor-intensive agricultures impact farm worker health and safety. He is currently a Koller Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Farm Medicine Center.
Hilary Faxon
Dr. Hilary Faxon investigates environment, development and technology with a focus on agrarian change in Southeast Asia. She is currently working on a project about how Myanmar farmers use Facebook to buy and sell seeds, crops, and land; share agricultural advice; and mobilize politically. She is a Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley and a Marie Curie Fellow in the Department of Food and Resource Economics at the University of Copenhagen.
Xaq Frohlich
Xaq Frohlich is an assistant professor of history of technology at Auburn University. His research focuses on the historical intersections of science, law, and markets, and how the three have shaped our modern, everyday understandings of food, risk, and responsibility. His work explores questions relating to consumerism and the changing relationships between the state, experts, and the public in the production of everyday knowledge: how do we “know” what we know about food and its relation to health? In what ways has our informational environment for food changed with the industrialization and globalization of food production and retailing?
Frohlich is currently completing a book manuscript, From Label to Table: Regulating Food in America in the Information Age (UC Press, 2023), which explores the history of efforts by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to manage food markets through the regulation of food labels in the second half of the twentieth century. The book explores the evolving policy debates between government officials, food industry representatives, consumer advocacy groups, and medical professionals over what kinds of expert information should the public know (or not know) about the foods American consumers purchase at the supermarket. His next project is a history of the "rediscovery" of the Mediterranean diet as a public health tool and regional brand in the late 20th century.
Frohlich earned his PhD in History, Anthropology, and STS at MIT in 2011. He was a 2009-2020 Fulbright scholar in Spain, a postdoc at KAIST in South Korea, a 2016–2017 visiting fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Vienna, Paris Dauphine University, and Hong Kong University. He teaches classes on food and power, the history of technology, the intersections of science, technology and the law, and the history of business and capitalism.
Ritwick Ghosh
Ritwick Ghosh is a Research Fellow at the New Carbon Economy Consortium, hosted at Arizona State University. He studies and teaches environmental governance, drawing on economics and science and technology studies. Ritwick has expertise in the social dimensions of various environmental and carbon accounting systems and how shows how they inform new governance mechanisms like carbon markets and payments for ecosystem services. Most of his projects are in the US but he has also written about governance issues in Europe, India, and Indonesia. Ritwick has worked in multiple international organizations including the UN Environmental Program and in private companies such as the Centennial Group. He has a Postdoctoral Fellowship from New York University and a PhD and a Masters in Public Administration from Cornell University.
Email: ritwick.ghosh@asu.edu
Website: www.ritwickghosh.com
Cornelius Heimstädt
I am a PhD student (4th and final year) at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI) at the Paris School of Mines. In my dissertation I study how the agtech sector attempts to solve problems of global food security. To do this, I conduct a lab studies-inspired ethnography in a German agtech startup developing an advisory app for small-scale farmers in India. Besides that I take part in a research project of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), working on issues related to biosecurity and decontamination. Before I started my PhD in Paris, I did a Master degree in STS at the University of Vienna. Prior to that, I wanted to become a vegetable gardener for quite some time which is why I did a Bachelor degree in organic agriculture at the University for Sustainable Development Eberswalde, while spending most of my spare time restoring a historic urban nursery in Leipzig with a group of friends.
Barkha Kagliwal
I am a PhD Candidate at Cornell University’s Department of Science and Technology Studies. My dissertation analyses how processing technologies and the visions of food in India are articulating relations between the state, society and technoscience. Before the PhD, I pursued a Masters in Anthropology at the New School and I have previous experience in the healthcare sector in both the UK and India.
Mascha Gugganig
Mascha Gugganig is an anthropologist and STS scholar whose research encompasses contested technologies in (settler colonial) agriculture and food production, including agricultural biotechnology, indoor vertical farming, and digital technologies in agriculture. Through ethnographic, (audiovisual) multimodal methods, policy and occasional historical analyses, her work is concerned with discourses, visions and practices of innovation in ‘sustainable agriculture’ that both constitute and defy binary anti- vs. high-tech narratives. One day she wants to learn how to properly navigate a tractor and an excavator. She is currently the Alex Trebek Postdoctoral Fellow in AI and Environment at the University of Ottawa.
Julie Guthman
A geographer by training (PhD, University of California 2000), Julie Guthman is currently a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she conducts research on the conditions of possibility for food system transformation in the US. Her most recent book, Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry (University of California Press, 2019) is a more-than-human account of how the industry’s reliance on soil fumigation reverberated through the entire production system. Wilted was the recipient of the 2020 American Association of Geographers Meridian Award for outstanding scholarly work in geography. Her prior publications include two other multi-award winning monographs, an edited collection, about fifty peer-reviewed journal articles and dozens of other book chapters, book reviews, commentaries, and public-facing pieces. Her research and writing has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the USDA, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, and Mesa Refuge. She has also received an Excellence in Research Award from the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society.
Currently, Julie is the principal investigator of the UC-AFTeR Project, a multi-campus collaboration exploring Silicon Valley’s recent forays into food and agriculture. Funded by the National Science Foundation, we seek to understand hoow Silicon Valley funding mechanisms, cultures of innovation, and technological tools encounter the unique material, cultural and political-economic aspects of food and agriculture in agri-food solution-making. Julie is an active member of STSFAN and has been moderating our monthly workshops since their inception.
Sarah Martin
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Sarah J. Martin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. She is a political economist specializing in the global political economy of food and agriculture. Her work as a cook, chef and meat cutter in a variety of settings from cafeterias to high-end restaurants to remote logging camps has led to an interest in how food politics is practiced in the everyday. She is currently researching the dynamics of food, feed and fuel in relation to agri-aqucultures, and recently, co-edited (with Ryan Katz-Rosene) Green Meat: Sustaining Animals, People and the Planet.
Sarah Marquis
Sarah began her PhD at the Institute of the Environment at uOttawa in September 2020 under the supervision of Dr. Kelly Bronson. She just finished her Master’s degree at the University of Guelph where she focused on technology use in agriculture. Her work focuses in particular on the impacts of ‘digital farming’ or ‘smart farming’ and how the emergence of agricultural Big Data is helping to reshape the politics and practices of farming. Her PhD research will continue to explore the social and environmental impacts of ag-tech in Canada, and she is particularly interested in the role of artificial intelligence in agriculture.
Charlie Mather
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Charlie Mather is professor of geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. His research focuses on the biopolitics of salmon aquaculture, supported by the Ocean Frontier Institute through a grant from Canada First Research Excellence Fund. His recent publications have appeared in Geoforum, Science, Technology and Human Values, Environment and Planning F, and the Journal of Agrarian Change. His full bio can be found here:
Emily Reisman
EMILY REISMAN is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environment and Sustainability at the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York. She studies the politics of knowing “what crops need,” particularly in almond production, and investigates Silicon Valley’s intersection with agriculture as a member of the UC Agri-Food Technology Research collaborative.
Sarah Ruth Sippel
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I’m a tenured lecturer at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology at Leipzig University, and a Principal Investigator at Leipzig’s German Research Foundation (DFG) funded research center ‘Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition’ (SFB 1199). I am also an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, where I have been a research partner for ten years. I have an interdisciplinary background, with training in Human Geography, Global and Area Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Philosophy, as well as several years of teaching experience in an Anthropology Department. I received my PhD in Human Geography in 2012, and finished my Habilitation (highest university degree in Germany) in Human Geography in 2020.
In my previous research, I intensively worked on the interlinkages between export agriculture, rural livelihood security, and labour migration in North Africa and the Western Mediterranean. My current research investigates how land, a vital resource for human survival, is turned into a ‘financial asset’ – an object for financial investment and speculation. By focusing on the people advancing this process – farmers, financiers, farm managers, brokers, politicians, among others – I provide an in-depth account of how and why this 'financial future' for land is being forged. Drawing on research throughout Australia and global agri-finance networks, I reveal the various motivations, constraints, and dilemmas, which – after several decades of neoliberal capitalism – draw increasing amounts of finance capital into agriculture.
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In addition to this research, I have recently started developing a new project on the research and development of digital farming technologies. This research aims to understand how, by whom, and with what intentions and objectives digital farming technologies are being developed, and what this means for the future of food production. I’m addressing these questions by undertaking participant observation and qualitative interviews in California and different AgTech hubs in Europe.
Kelsey Speakman
Kelsey Speakman is a PhD candidate in Communication and Culture at York University. Her recent work addresses meat marketing, alternative proteins, and new trends in grocery shopping. Currently, Kelsey's research explores communication practices surrounding beef in contemporary Canadian supermarkets.
