Kelly Bronson

Kelly Bronson is a Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Science and Society at University of Ottawa in Canada. She is a social scientist studying and helping to mitigate science-society tensions that erupt around controversial technologies and their governance—from GMOs to big data. Her research aims to bring community values and non-technical knowledge into conversation with technical in the production of evidence-based decision-making. She has published her work in regional (Journal of New Brunswick Studies), national (Canadian Journal of Communication) and international journals (Journal of Responsible Innovation, Big Data and Society).

Most broadly, my research uses qualitative and innovative methods to bring rights holder needs and concerns into the design and governance of emergent and controversial technologies

• data collection (interviewing, grey and academic literature search, documents analysis)
• transcription
• inductive content analysis or textual analysis
• careful reading/collective thinking
• facilitation

1. What kind of power relationships do agricultural innovations help to disrupt or to reproduce?
2. What “imaginaries” inform the development and decision-making on agricultural innovations and with what implications for living well together—humans/non-humans?
3. How might we bring social science and humanities expertise to bear on highly technical policy-making processes? (e.g. environmental impact assessment)
4. What are novel methods (e.g. criteria mapping) for capturing the complexities associated with socio-ecological systems during policy-making?
5. How might we open up what constitutes expertise (or politically viable knowledge) in decision-making processes to reflection and scrutiny?

Books:

• The Promissory Futures of Big Agricultural Data, power and resistance in the digital agricultural revolution, McGill-Queen’s University Press (in press, expected fall 2019)
• Interdisciplinary Perspectives in Food Studies. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Koc, Mustafa, MacRae, Rod and Kelly Bronson, eds (2007)

Papers:

• “The food revolution will not be digitized: change, resistance and stability under smart farming innovations in Canada,” Wageningen Journal of Life Sciences, special issue on social responses to smart farming, Bronson, Kelly (in press)
•  “Digital Agriculture,” Elsevier encyclopedia on food and sustainability, Bronson, Kelly (2018)
•  “Smart Farming: Including Rights Holders for Responsible Agricultural Innovation,” Technology Innovation Management Review 8(2): 7-15 Bronson, Kelly (2018)
• “(Re)producing Power: A study of the New Brunswick Energy Institute” Journal of New Brunswick Studies 7(2): 71-91 Bronson, Kelly (2018)