9:30am - 9:50am REFLECTIONS ON THE POST-COLONIAL TURN IN AUSTRALASIAN AGRIFOOD STUDIES Hugh Campbell
The 2018 and 2019 meetings of the Agrifood Research Network saw a significant rise in theoretical discussion of the relevance of post-colonial theorising in agrifood studies in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. This paper reflects on how this theoretical turn is challenging some orthodox theoretical frameworks in Agrifood research and how we might develop new ways to think about Agrifood research in colonised landscapes. One pathway forward is to re-centre the colonial farm as an agent of agricultural colonisation. The colonial farm provides one possible locus where a nexus of human and more than human agencies formed to create particularly powerful cluster of economic, political and ontological colonising effects. The paper concludes by briefly looking at the example of one colonial farm from the 1850s and how it reveals the multiple lines of collaboration and fracture that were enacted at the farming frontier in Aotearoa New Zealand.
9:50am - 10:10am SCIENCE, GENDER AND THE STATE: AGRICULTURAL SCIENCE BULLETINS AND NEW ZEALAND FARMING IN THE MID-20TH CENTURY Sophie Dix
Recent agrifood conferences have begun to explore the way that agricultural science contributed to the elaboration of High Modernity in places like New Zealand in the 20th century. My honours dissertation has considered how a particular kind of agricultural science text – the farmer bulletins of the NZ Journal of Agriculture – both contributed to empowering the High Modernist state, but also had wider social effects that are less anticipated by scholars of modernity. Starting with James C. Scott, my dissertation explored the standardisation and legitimisation of agricultural science as a governing strategy of the state. But in applying a discourse analysis to these agricultural textbooks, both visible and invisible gendering and racial marginalisation is apparent. Donna Haraway’s theory of situated knowledges was used to further help examine and explore the inherent gendering embedded into science claims and texts claiming to provide objective knowledge about farming. I conclude by arguing that agricultural science texts were both generating particular discourses about modernity and science, as well as linking science, rationality and farming to an extremely gendered world which strongly empowered (white) men and entirely marginalised women and Maori as being relevant to the elaboration of a rational and scientific farming world.
10:10am - 10:30am CLASS IN RURAL NEW ZEALAND Ann Pomeroy
A preliminary exploration of an under-researched topic, class divisions in rural New Zealand, points to major inequalities that are highly likely to be affecting the life chances of some rural residents. Alongside a literature scan, census and socio-economic deprivation data for the rural component of 20 of New Zealand’s territorial authorities show there is considerable variation between the three rural settlement types (open-countryside outside centres of 300+ people, small centres 300-999 people, and minor-urban areas 1,000 – 10,000 people). A neo-Weberian three-class structure based on Eric Olin Wright’s typology developed for the USA, is used to explain the clear inequalities between these settlement types.
This analysis shows that while geographic location may constrain, or facilitate, the life chances and access to services and material possessions of New Zealand’s rural population in general, social distinctions such as ethnicity and gender, and class divisions emanating from ownership of productive property, also influence rural people’s life-chances and well-being.
10:30am - 10:50am NEW ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE AND MEDIA SURVEILLANCE Alison Loveridge
In the New Zealand farming/environment interface, a traditional command and control system administered by regional government using resource consents and other surveillance tools exists alongside individualised responses such as on-farm environment plans. Over the past two decades, monitoring of resource consents for discharge of dairy effluent shows improved compliance with effluent rules by individuals alongside declining water quality in the face of intensification of farming. Government policy depends on farm environmental plans, audited by certified consultants, to show how set limits for environmental indicators will be achieved, and result in improved water quality in the future. Because these farm environmental plans are confidential, oversight of compliance with resource consents by activists and media is likely to remain a crucial form of citizen surveillance. Scrutinising lists of resource consent infringers nationally enables “naming and shaming” of prominent offenders, but is this effective? While the farm plan will provide regional councils with more sophisticated data on farm management practices, use of these plans may close down the possibilities of understanding these nuances for external players reliant on open access data. A case study of Canterbury compliance data and its mobilisation by activists highlights these ethical and organizational problems.
