dr. KA (Katharine) Legun

dr. KA (Katharine) Legun

Universitair hoofddocent

I'm an Associate Professor in the Knowledge, Technology and Innovation Group. I'm a Canadian from Victoria, BC. I did my PhD in the US (at Wisconin-Madison, 2013) and I worked for 6 years at the University of Otago in Aotearoa New Zealand before moving to WUR. My particular focus is on more-than-human relations built between technologies and plants through farming practices as they enact a politics of knowledge within food systems. 

At the moment, I am focusing on two big projects:

  • Plants and power: This is an ongoing project that looks at botany and social power through case research on horticultural industries, breeding programs, and new AI technologies that are programmed to interpret and interact with plants. I am currently initiating some work on crop imaginaries, breeding programs, and shifting geographies of power in production. 
  • Data Justice: through the Wageningen Global Sustainability Program, I am collaborating accross Wageningen on the project Food Security Intelligence (2024-2029) to look at data justice in the domain of food security.

I am interested in supervising Master's theses that touch on the following general topics:

  • implications of new techniques in plant breeding 
  • (historical changes in) the organization of plant breeding
  • technologies and the politics of care in agriculture
  • data justice in agricultural technologies/data commons
  • grassroots technologies in farming

 

I have, in the recent past, been involved with the following projects:

I am currently President of the Research Committee on the Sociology of Agriculture and Food (ISA RC-40) in the International Sociological Association. I co-edited the Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology with Julie Keller, Michael Bell, and Michael Carolan. (see vol 1 here and vol 2 here) published in 2020