Between Scales, Subjectivities and Species: Towards a political ecological theory of futurity in agri-food systems

Anthropologists, geographers and STS scholars are increasingly focussed on the materialities and meanings of ‘the future’. This interest manifests itself in diverse theoretical and empirical approaches exploring how futures are engaged with and emerge across and between different scales. This ranges from work that considers the affective, embodied resonances of future-oriented practices to explorations of assemblages, socio-technical imaginaries and historical trajectories. Different approaches produce or rely on different understandings of the openness of the future, more-than-human agencies and the politics of possibility at a time of intersecting socio-ecological crises. This presentation draws on my doctoral fieldwork with English agricultural producers, innovators and campaigners in an attempt to approach the future across these intersecting scales in a political ecological way. In this sense I look to draw together and reconcile Marxian approaches to historical-geographical specificity and ecology with scholarship that integrates a concern with diverse more-than-human agencies and temporalities at the scale of the everyday practices of agricultural production and innovation.