About ASSEMBLE (Eng)
Researchers and farmers are working together in collaborative assemblages to co-produce knowledge and deepen dialogue between different actor groups. ASSEMBLE strives to empower farmers, policymakers, and researchers to co-create sustainable agricultural futures.
ASSEMBLE draws on New Materialist theory as a way to translate theoretical recognition of more relational ways of knowing and being into actionable science, exploring how to create spaces for novel relationships to emerge.
Jamila Haider on how her previous work led to ASSEMBLE:
“I conceptualize resilience as the process of the ever-changing capacity to be with change, through interacting dynamics of persisting, adapting and transforming. Based on a collaborative ethnography in the Austrian Alps, we have shown how resilience depends on creative and novel responses to change. Paradoxically, policies intended to support small-scale farmers often have the perverse effect of eroding their resilience, by eliminating the opportunity to respond creatively to uncertainty. Two major knowledge gaps that motivate the research of ASSEMBLE are: 1) understanding enabling and constraining conditions for resilience capacities of farming, and 2) understanding our role as researchers not just to deepen understanding and inform action and policy, but also that we are entangled in the becoming of the world.”
