Research project Digital Nature
Social-technical relations and practices within Sweden’s rural agriculture and harvesting industry.
Digital platforms are fundamentally transforming the way we live, work and play, normalizing everyday digital-social-spatial relations. The dominant articulation of ‘platform urbanism’ makes one wonder what the social consequences of platformization are in rural areas and the ways digital life in the rural may be theoretically and empirically different.
Project description
In Sweden, despite high hopes that digital technologies will make the rural competitive and attractive, we know little about social-technical practices and relations in the rural, and how the diverse rural spaces and places are connected to and from platformization. This project asks: 1) How is digital technology incorporated into everyday social and economic life in specific Swedish rural contexts? 2) How do everyday digitally mediated practices change rural social-technical relations and spatialities? 3) What are the consequences and implications of these relations for regional development? 4) What role does platformization play in normalizing, reproducing or reinforcing social inequalities/divides? Utilizing ethnographic, digital and computational methods, we will explore the questions in three nature-based industries situated in varied Swedish rural contexts – Beekeeping, Organic Farming and Wild Berry Refinement. This project has strong social relevance by addressing rural development, sustainability, and equality. We further advance this material to theoretically explore the role of rurality in shaping digital relations.
Project members
Project managers
Qian Zhang
Researcher
Members
Natasha Webster
Senior Lecturer
Linn Axelsson
Associate Professor
Shengnan Han
Associate professor
More about this project
Project activities (2023-):
Conference presentation and participation:
Qian Zhang and Natasha Webster. “Rural Digitalization 2.0: Digging into context, everyday life and rural digital geographies”, presented at conference “Ruralities and Regions in Transition”, November 2023, Åkersberga, Sweden.
Qian Zhang. “Smart adaptation: Reconceptualizing digital-farming relations through exploring everyday rural life”, presented at conference “Green Transitions on Nordic Farms: Linking changing climate and farming practices”, September 2023, Uppsala, Sweden.
Nils Pettersson, Charlotta Hedberg, Linn Axelsson, Madeleine Eriksson. “Wild berry shifting: Berry flows, actor relations and sustainability transition of the wild berry industry”, scientific poster presented at “Nordic Wildberry Conference 2023”, September 2023, Umeå, Sweden.
Natasha Webster. “Sticky problems: Conceptualizing local Honey in digital geography”, presented at conference “Migration and Social Change”, June 2023, Utrecht University (online).
Others:
Department higher seminar given by guest, lecturer and Dr. Alistair Fraser from Maynooth University, Ireland, titled “‘Hack the land!’: Digital geographies of resistance and the planetary struggle for land”, September 2023.