Roger Epp and Darin Barney

Roger Epp is Professor of Political Science at the University of Alberta. A native of rural Saskatchewan and a fifth-generation settler on Treaty 6 territory, his research responds to the responsibilities of place and to the question of what it means to live in the prairie West with a sense of memory and care. Among other works, he is author of We Are All Treaty People: Prairie Essays, contributing co-editor of Writing Off the Rural West: Globalization, Governments, and the Transformation of Rural Communities, and co-producer of the documentary, "The Canadian Clearances," for CBC Radio's Ideas. He was an honorary witness at a hearing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

Darin Barney is Professor and Grierson Chair in Communication Studies at McGill University. He was born in Burnaby, British Columbia, on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. He studied at Simon Fraser University and the University of Toronto, where he trained in political theory and received a PhD in 1999. He has worked at several universities in Canada and the United States and from 2005-2015 was Canada Research Chair in Technology & Citizenship at McGill. He was President of the Canadian Communication Association from 2010-2012, and served on the Advisory Council of the Law Commission of Canada from 2000-2005. He has received several awards for his academic work, including the inaugural SSHRC Aurora Prize for outstanding contribution to Canadian intellectual life by a new researcher. Barney’s research focuses on materialist approaches to media and communication, infrastructure, environment and politics, with particular attention to resource infrastructures related to the extractive economy in Canada. He is a member of the Petrocultures Research Group, a founding member of the After Oil Collective and the Radical Critical Theory Circle, and convenes the Grierson Research Group.

Title and abstract:

Accumulation by automation: mediating agricultural dispossession in the Canadian Prairies 

The agricultural economy of the Canadian Prairies has been and remains a site of settler-colonial dispossession, extractive industry and environmental depletion. It has also been the site of rural community, regional and local economies and social formations, and political innovation, largely tied to the forms of labour characteristic of agricultural production through the 20th-century (i.e., farming and ranching). Large-scale agriculture and its infrastructures have played a central role in these dynamics. This paper examines the forms of technical and discursive mediation involved in recent and projected intensifications of extractive agriculture in the Prairies, via technologies that would automate grain and meat production to an unprecedented degree, promising an agriculture relieved of forms of labour that add friction to current accumulation strategies. We are interested in the media and the discourses that enable these strategies, including advanced communication and biotechnologies and rhetorics of autonomy, health, and environmental sustainability. Approaching this as the projected culmination of a second great dispossession in the construction of the Canadian Prairies as an extractive zone, we propose a different accounting for change, one that considers the losses obscured in “clean” technological futures,  in order to consider the possibilities of thinking and inhabiting the Prairies otherwise.

Source: Jules B. Billard, “The Revolution in American Agriculture,” National Geographic, February 1970. Paintings by Davis Meltzer. 147-185.