The project, the everyday, and reflexivity in sociotechnical agri‑food assemblages: proposing a conceptual model of digitalisation

Digital technologies have opened up new perspectives in thinking about the future of food and farming. Not only do these
new technologies promise to revolutionise our way of meeting global food demand, they do so by boldly claiming that they
can reduce their environmental impacts. However, they also have the potential to transform the organisation of agri-food sys-
tems more fundamentally. Drawing on assemblage theory, we propose a conceptual model of digitalisation organised around
three facets: digitalisation as a project; “everyday digitalisation”; and reflexive digitalisation. These facets reflect different
relations between concrete practices and representations, imaginaries, and narratives, while representing different modes of
agency: the collective, the distributed, and the individual, which, we argue, highlight contrasting ways for human and non-
human actors to engage with digitalisation. With this model anchored in assemblage theory, we offer a tool for critically and
comprehensively engaging with the complexity and multiplicity of digitalisation as a sociotechnical process. We then apply
our theoretical framework to two ethnographic studies, one explores the growth of digital technologies in Switzerland as a
way to govern and monitor national agriculture, the other focuses on Indonesia, where small digital startups have begun to
dot the landscape. By identifying the material and semiotic processes occurring in each case, we notice similar issues being
raised in terms of how digitalisation is co-constructed in society.