We are pleased to announce Mylène Tanferri as the speaker of this CEH Talk. Mylène is a Marie Skłodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Technologies in Practice & Center for Climate IT at the University of Copenhagen. Her broad topic concerns perceptual practices in digitization processes. DIGIPHYT, her current project, examines plant sensors for agriculture, the role of non-human entities in their development, and the sustainability claims attached to them. 

As always, this CEH Talk is open to everyone and free to attend. Coffee and tea provided!

Please see more about Mylène here.

Abstract

Over the last few decades, a growing number of companies and startups have been developing technologies to improve plant production for food under the names digital, precision, or smart agriculture, which may have prompted changes in the relationships between humans and cultivated plants. Drawing on recent fieldwork at a European Agtech company developing phytosensors, Mylène examines the claims made for these sensors, which aim to "make plants talk" for growers to listen, by translating electrophysiological signals into real-time alerts of irrigation stress or pest attacks before visual symptoms. Tracing the daily practices of developers and growers using sensors and other monitoring tools, Mylène explores the forms of attention, knowledge, and relationship-making that emerge when plants become data sources in a larger (startup) economy. In doing so, Mylène tries to unpack what “making plants talk” means more specifically (who speaks? What manipulations, translations, and interpretations are needed?) to examine questions related to the circulations between engineering and agronomic knowledge, but also time and space and species/technologies agencies: where do these knowledge systems converge or diverge in understanding plant life? What agencies do plants, sensors, and algorithms exercise in these sociotechnical assemblages, and what kind of collective times and disjointed spaces emerge from these? Bringing multispecies ethnography into conversation with STS approaches to datafication, her goal is to unpack technological claims and follow digital practices to discuss the roles of technologies in human-plant relationships in digital agriculture.