This session is one in a pair of sessions. The sessions aim to bring multi-species social sciences into dialogue with political ecology in an exploration of the relationship between non-human agency, smallholder knowledges and practices and wider systems of governance in agriculture. The session includes presentations from empirical contexts in the Global South and North, by presenters from the Global South and North.

Mainstream research and agriculture development interventions frequently frame knowledge as universal and linear, with modernist, science-based knowledge typically characterising ‘successful’ farming. Empirical evidence, as well as research on knowledge production, repeatedly tells us that this is a far call from reality. Knowledge is social, contextual and situated; and farmers’ knowledge production is entangled with their farming practices and the wider agroecological context. As a result, more holistic multi-species lens has the potential to add important dimensions to our understandings of how smallholders can be supported in meaningful ways, and with technologies that are appropriate and desirable. Like political ecology, multispecies perspectives address the entanglements between nature and society and strive to shift our ontological standpoints away from modernist dualist places towards relational ways of being and relating.

Within this context, this session seeks to draw attention to multi-species understandings of the relational agencies that shape smallholder farming; and of how entanglements between crops, livestock, insects and pathogens shape farmers’ practices and situated knowledges. Importantly, we seek efforts that engage in such multi-species perspectives without losing sight of wider systems of power and control.

MAIZE SEED TECHNOLOGIES AND THE UNRAVELLING OF RELATIONAL AGROECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE ON SMALLHOLDER FARMS IN SOUTH AFRICA


This paper explores the effects of the technification of maize seed on social-ecological knowledge and practices within smallholder maize agriculture. Like all technologies, maize seed technologies are not neutral ‘objects’ but are rather deeply entangled in the history and politics of knowledge production. Commercial technologies such as hybrid and GM seeds are of a particular lineage of thought rooted in the post-enlightenment age of modernist, dualist science in which humans have come to be treated as separate from ‘nature’.

Today smallholder farmers are often treated as the receivers of unidirectional transfers of knowledge with little attention paid to the lineage of knowledge embodied in smallholder farming. We draw on a multispecies approach - focusing on changing social-ecological relationships around maize seed in smallholder maize agriculture in Northern KZN, South Africa. Among other factors, the technifcation of seed has contributed to a growing disconnect between farmers and their social-ecological knowledge and relationships with more-than humans.

Through exploring the meeting points between humans and all other lifeforms we suggest that maize agriculture offers space to consider alternative agricultural pathways beyond the dominance of dualist science. Drawing on decolonial literature we emphasise the need to de-center the hegemony of modernist agricultural science (from which modern seed comes) and to bring in knowledge from the margins.