Doing Social Research: The Podcast · Doing Social Research

Researching the Politics of AI, Big Data, & Agribusiness with Dr. Kelly Bronson

·1 hr 37 min·2 clips

Phyllis Rippey frames the show as a place for making social research feel less opaque. She introduces Dr. Kelly Bronson as an associate professor at the University of Ottawa whose work crosses science, technology, and society. The conversation names a broad set of controversies, including GMOs, fracking, big data, and AI. Rippey signals that she is especially interested in the AI side of Bronson's work. Bronson begins with a simple feeling that kept building on the lab bench: curiosity. That curiosity led her to leave the bench and head to Saskatchewan. There she found farmers in disputes with large input supply companies, including Monsanto. Those disputes involved patent fights over seed technologies. Bronson stresses that the farmers were often scientifically educated. Their concerns were not about whether the science existed. Instead, they were worried about what the technologies would do to their businesses and communities. GMO seeds could contaminate organic property and shut off access to European markets. The episode also follows the social cost of those disputes. Bronson describes rural communities under strain. She notes that Monsanto was paying farmers to spy on one another. That kind of pressure sharpened divides between biotech and non-biotech farmers. The result was a more fractured rural public. Bronson links those fractures to the broader power of corporate control over agriculture. She keeps coming back to the fact that farming is already an increasingly difficult economic proposition. From there, the discussion turns toward risk itself. Bronson is interested in the models of risk used by legal and regulatory systems. Health Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency come up as examples. The episode asks how those institutions study and define risk. Rippey keeps the conversation moving while leaving room for Bronson to give the long version. The result is a grounded look at how AI, big data, and agricultural politics meet in the real world.

As heard by us

AI, big data, and agribusiness are tied to farmers' fears about patents, GMO contamination, and rural fracture.

Kelly Bronson and Phyllis Rippey frame AI, big data, and agribusiness as a question of power: who gets to define risk, who bears it, and whose evidence carries weight.

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Why you'd press play

When you want AI politics explained through farming disputes and regulatory power.

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