ICS Senior Research Fellow appointment

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Dr Katharine Legun to the role of Senior Research Fellow (Technology and Society) at the Institute for Culture and Society.

Katharine Legun is an Associate Professor in the Knowledge, Technology and Innovation Group at Wageningen University & Research (WUR) in the Netherlands. Prior to joining WUR in 2020, she spent several years as a Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Otago in Aotearoa New Zealand. She's originally from British Columbia in Canada, and after early degrees at UBC in Vancouver, she earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2013). Katharine's work sits at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS), environmental sociology, and agri-food studies. Within these domains, she looks at more-than-human, multi-species relations that are built through the configuration of technologies and plants in agriculture, and that enact a politics of knowledge and agency within food systems. Her emerging research in this area explores how actors create global commercial crops and cropping systems through science and technology in ways that affect regional temporalities—particularly the experiences of stability, continuity, and (climate) change. Katharine's work has also considered the social implications of particular forms of digitalisation, artificial intelligence, and robotics in agriculture, in terms of how it reflects assumptions about environmental governance, skills, and work. She advocates for ethical design, emphasizing the inclusion of agricultural workers and small farmers in the development of new machinery, information systems, and robotics, and design that centres on the meanings and experiences of agricultural work. She is currently President of the Research Committee on the Sociology of Agriculture and Food in the International Sociological Association (ISA-RC40). She has published widely in prominent journals such as Journal of Rural Studies, Agriculture and Human Values, Geoforum, and Economy and Society, and is lead editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology (2020).