10 September 2024As in many sectors, agribusiness corporations often collect, sort, exchange, and sell data about their users to third parties. This (big) data, often concerning farms and farmers, may be processed by algorithms, which then shape reality in overt and subtle ways. While such data driven shifts have become politicized in other spheres, observers often spare agribusiness corporations, who are viewed as technical, impartial arbiters of supposedly neutral data heralded with the power to drive social change. This is what sociologist Kelly Bronson, the Canada Research Chair in Science and Society at the University of Ottawa, refers to as the immaculate conception of data (ICD). At the centre of the author’s investigations are different groups (scientific, professional, activist), which deploy the ICD to their benefit, whether through technical, academic, government conventions and conferences, or through agricultural newspapers, trade journals, and corporate platforms in the US and Canada. This mobilization of data allows, she argues, the crossing of subjects and epistemic lenses between separate subdisciplines: digitization as a tool for reproducing power (data studies); technology in power relations and food sovereignty (food studies); the use and authority of scientific knowledge (science studies). Ultimately, Bronson aims at bringing to light the politics of technologies at the centre by reflecting on these technologies’ social means of production.