Non Technical Summary
Archetypes are concise statements that summarize a given perspective on agriculture or the food system, stressing the goals or purposes that it is expected to perform. The project develops four such archetypes with an aim of provoking better understanding of the reasons why people differ in their expectations for agriculture, potentially leading to a more constructive dialong among people holding different views. One archetype views the agricultural sector much as an innovator would view any sector of an industrial economy: innovation should lower production costs or open new markets, subject to constraints of public health and environmental safety. We call this the technological modernization archetype. A second, sustainable intensification, emphasises increasing the total global potential for production of agricultural commodities subject to the contraint of maintaining the resource base (e.g. soil fertility, water availability) and the landbase in non-agricultural uses needed to preserve biodiversity. The third, regional food systems, follows a centuries-long trajectory presuming that food system innovations should serve the interests and promote the well-being of primary producers (farmers, pastoralists, fishers). Goals addressing conservation or productive capacity should, in this archetype, be evaluated in terms of the socioeconomic sustainability of the farming lifestyle and the rural communities. The last archetype, urban agriculture, reflects a growing sense that urban areas cannot continue to rely upon food systems based in rural areas. It embraces both urban farming and technologies that would convert food into more of a manufactured good. Although these are not logically contradictory visions, they do create tensions that affect the fate of advanced technologies being developed to affect current food systems.The project also includes activities intended to explore the value of these archetypes. One will examine how they might change or be changed by current social science approaches to analyzing the food system, or to the execution of a program to innovate new agricultural technology. Here, our project will connect with efforts to conjoin an ethical analysis to large projects intened to increase capacity for technological innovation. A second activity will introduce the archetype idea to two key stakeholder groups: farmers and rural communities, on the one hand, and urban residents and planners, on the other. For this urban group, we will be especially interested in whether ethical archetypes for food systems are viewed as helpful to them in articulating challenges they face with resepect to food security and local control over their food.

Classification

Knowledge Area (KA)	Subject of Investigation (SOI)	Field of Science (FOS)	Percent
610	6099	3080	30%
803	6099	3040	50%
902	6030	3060	20%

Knowledge Area
902 - Administration of Projects and Programs; 803 - Sociological and Technological Change Affecting Individuals, Families, and Communities; 610 - Domestic Policy Analysis;

Subject Of Investigation
6099 - People and communities, general/other; 6030 - The farm as an enterprise;

Field Of Science
3040 - History; 3060 - Political science; 3080 - Sociology;

Goals / Objectives
The project will develop an analysis of contrasting and sometimes incompatible priorities for technological innovations in agriculture and food systems. This analysis will stress overarching rationales, purposes and normative interpretations of social functions performed by food and fiber production, and the integration of production practices into the larger system of socio-economic transactions. It will facillitate reflection and articulation of reasons for undertaking or supporting a specific trajectory or plan of innovation.A secondary objective is to encourage a public dialog on innovations that will more satisfactorily expose the reasons and purposes for innovation that are assumed or imagined by innovators, as well as reasons that others may have for resisting or attempting to subvert a given course of innovation. The background for this objection is the lack of a fruitful public debate over the use of recombinant methods for altering the genomes of agricultural plants and animals during the first era of genetic engineering (roughly 1997-2007).The third objective is to discover how this analysis might be deployed in public settings by conducting workshops with two key stakeholder groups: farm producers and urban residents, especially those who face ongoing challenges to food security.

Project Methods
The medods for the central objective, a study of priority setting archetypes in food and agriculture, conjoin a philosophical analysis with textual interpretation and grounded theoretical observations of actors working on innovative technology, as well as actors working politically to oppose it. Philosophical analysis here involves application of concepts in logic, ethical theory and philosophy of science to problems to articulate a vision (an archetype) that distills aspiriations and plans for innovation into a concise statement that articulates reasons and rationales for a given set of innovation goals. Much as legal expertise consists in familiarization with a large set of specific cases and the subsequent distillation of legal principles, the philosophical expertise being applied here consists in knowledge of arguments used to defend or criticize a given course of action. This base of argument forms and associated principles extends back at least to the 5th century BCE. This expertise will be applied to an expansive literature of recent documents expressing and sometimes defending visions or expectations for the future configuration of agriculture and food systems. Some of these documents are technical reports but many are books and articles where authors articulate a preferred understanding of agriculture, including an defense of the specific social purposes that they expect any agriculture to have, or a critique of possible futures that they feel should be avoided. Finally, the lead PI has forty years of experience attending scientific meetngs and reading or hearing activisits defend alternative visions. This experience provides a basis for a grounded theory apporach to summarization and articulation of underlying normative or ethical commitments of various food-system actors.The methods for the second key objective encompass the full range of social science methodology, or the study, articulation and critique of ways to develop and apply theory in the rural social sciences. Representatives for a sample of current socio-economic research schools will analyze the analysis developed in Objective 1 with the aim of identifying strengths and weaknesses, as well as possible hypotheses that could provoke new studies of technological innovation in agriculture by social scientists. These methods will help channel uptake of the philosophical work within the existing social science research capabilities associated with agriculture, agricultural technology and food system performance.The methods for the third objective will be a facillitated workship involving small cohorts, one reflecting the interests of farms and farm communities, the other reflecting the interests of urban food consumers, especially those facing food insecurity. Facillitation will elicit reactions as to how the archetypes lead them to reflect upon or reimagine their own goals, as well as their ciricumstances vis a vis the goals and assumptions of other actors affecting food system performance. The key research question here will be to determine if archetypes can provoke a more open ended and productive exchange of views on the priorties for innovation in food systems. Transcripts of these workshops will be analysed using qualitative methods, and a sociological study of the reception of archetypes will be developed.