Barbara Van Dyck
Profile & curriculum
-
Agroecology Lab, Université Libre de Bruxelles. Principal investigator ULYSSE - FNRS grant, and honorary research fellow at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University (UK) (since 2024)
-
Associate professor political agroecology,Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University, UK (2020-2023).
-
Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Science and Policy Research Unit (SPRU) and Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability (STEPS)-Centre, University of Sussex,UK (2017-2020).
-
Agroecology Lab, Free University of Brussels ULB. Postdoctoral research fellow and Participatory Action Research facilitator for food system research (Funding Action CoCreate, Brussels Innovation Agency Innoviris (2016 – 2017).
Research interests
My work is situated at the intersection of questions of agriculture, technology, innovation and social change and draws on the fields of agroecology, science & technology studies, and political ecology. My main line of inquiry revolves around the entanglement of dominant economic and political interests with agricultural research and innovation, in the context of a historically constructed organisation of modern sciences in disciplinary silos.
Research project
The fusion of technologies that blur the lines between the digital and biological spheres is expected to play a crucial role in the building of climate-smart and resilient food systems. This biodigital convergence is premised on big data collection about farmers’ and consumers’ behaviour, soil and climate conditions, living organisms’ genomic structures, and the growth of plants and animals, in combination with dedicated infrastructures, finance and policy mechanisms. More than a technological transition, biodigitalisation in agriculture is construed as an inescapable revolution that will transform the way societies farm, what farm work looks like and ultimately how life is created and sustained.
​
FRICTION - a political agroecology at the encounter of biodigital innovation and farming worlds in Belgium -.brings together the fields of science and technology studies, political ecology and agroecology to study biodigital technologies and related infrastructures, as contested terrains that are indivisible from power dynamics and the longer histories of agricultural modernisation. Developing a genealogical approach, the project lays bare the actors, interests, and sources of authority that come together in the biodigital imperative. More importantly, the project explores what happens when biodigital technologies meet with peasant farmers, an encounter that is all but frictionless.
.
Selected publications
2023 _ Schimpf, M., Seufert, P et Van Dyck, B. Remote Control & Peasant Intelligence. On automating decisions, suppressing knowledges and transforming ways of knowing. Technical report FOEE, FIAN & CAWR.
2022 _ Claeys, P. & Van Dyck, B. ECVC Youth: Navigating Dreams & Precarity. Working and Learning Conditions of Young Agricultural Workers, Interns and Volunteers Across Europe, La Via Campesina. 20 p.
2021 _ Van Dyck, Barbara, and Nettie Wiebe. "The Reassurance of the Unknown: A Conversation with Nettie Wiebe." Development 64, no. 3 (2021): 266-271.
2021 _ Arora, Saurabh and Van Dyck, Barbara. Refusal as radical care? Moving beyond modern industrial agriculture. Development 64, no. 3 (2021): 252-258.
2021 _ Sharma, Divya, Van Dyck, Barbara. ‘Thinking through the lens of the other’. Chapter in Claire Lamine, Danièle Magda, Marta Rivera-Ferre (Ed) Agroecological transition, between determinist and open-ended visions, Peter Lang, 318 p.
2021 _ Van Dyck, Barbara, Kenis, Anneleen and Stirling, Andy. ‘The genetically modified organism shall not be refused? Talking back to the technosciences’. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, published 31 August 2021 online first.