Science, Technology, and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard
Date and Time
Location
"Obstinate Harvest: Corporate Food and the Technoscience of Supply Chain Sustainability"
Speaker:
Susanne E. Freidberg, Professor of Geography, Dartmouth College.
Contact:
Shana Rabinowich
shana_rabinowich@hks.harvard.edu
Chair:
Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.
Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Thursday of the week before the event.
Abstract:
How is “Big Food” dealing with threats to its own sustainability? In recent years major food manufacturers and retailers have come to see climate change, water scarcity and other environmental problems as risks they can no longer afford to ignore. These risks are typically greatest at the farthest reaches of their supply chains, on farms and in forests and fisheries. To address them, companies together with non-governmental organizations have launched ambitious projects to assess and somehow improve supply chain sustainability. Out of these have come new metrics, calculative devices and company-sponsored field experiments, implemented from the U.S. Midwest to the vanilla farms of Madagascar. These projects show how supply chains more generally have become key sites for the production and application of technoscientific knowledge. At the same time, they reveal how even the world’s biggest food companies struggle with their own supply chains’ murky, varied, yet often refractory nature.
Biography:
Susanne Freidberg is Professor of Geography at Dartmouth College. Her research explores the workings of food supply across multiple geographic scales and regions. While her earliest work focused on cultures of commerce in African fresh produce trades, her more recent projects have spanned transnational supply chains, examining how science, technology and expertise are mobilized to assure various qualities in food and its provisioning. She is the author of French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age, as well as Fresh: A Perishable History, winner of the Society for the History of Technology’s 2010 Sally Hacker Prize.