Seminar Series | Is the Farm a Digital Factory?: Labor, Leafy Greens, and the Limits of Automation with Summer Sullivan

Host:Madeleine Fairbairn

Silicon Valley investors, entrepreneurs, and engineers are increasingly interested in agriculture as a site to disrupt and improve upon with their technologies. The nearby Salinas Valley – known as the Salad Bowl of the World – might be considered a “ground zero” for these operations of technological introduction, with some calling it the Silicon Valley of Agriculture. This exit talk showcases my research on the evolving context in which new technologies are transforming social and environmental relations, especially for already exploited, racialized workers in the Salinas Valley. I trace the uneven ways in which agricultural automation is unfolding, but also its profound limits within the region’s delicate, leafy farming systems. Through interviews, focus groups, participant observation, and historical analysis, I will show how the materiality of crops such as lettuce continues to organize labor and limit full automation. Contributing to critical analysis of the uneven racial, class, and gender dynamics of the “future of work,” this project centers emergent, uncertain relationships among farmworkers, the plants they care for, and the fragile futures of capitalism.

In person and on Zoom

Meeting ID:  949 5253 7079

Passcode: 552886