Research Approach

ASSEMBLE works in three main areas: 1) Discourse analysis of how agrarian change is represented in media, 2) Collaborative ethnographies (including multispecies ethnographies) and 3) facilitation of transformative dialogue spaces.

Case studies

ASSEMBLE focuses on small scale farming in mountain systems - primarily transhumanant dairy. The dairy sector of the food system has attracted a lot of criticism and scrutiny because of its high level of greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, cattle grazing systems are widely recognized as maintaining Europe’s highest nature and culture value landscapes, such as Alpine meadows and pastures. The project focuses on two case study countries: Austria and Sweden. Both host high-nature-value (HNV) grasslands in Areas of Natural Constraint (ANC ) but have historically different policy priorities.

 

Austria

Austria has strongly supported small-scale farming, with an average cattle herd size of 12. Austria is an interesting case because of its high proportion of small-scale milk producers and that it is at the forefront of sustainable dairy production and processing. The Austrian case study takes place in multiple sites in Salzburgerland (mountain area, periphery valleys and moorland).

Sweden

In contrast, the average cattle herd size is 97. The Swedish case study will focus on dialogues with actors in small to medium scale production, retailers and dairy cooperatives.

 

What has been done in ASSEMBLE so far?

Cobecoming together: Building on a previous project, Jamila has spent four years working with alpine farmer Präa Sepp in a collaborative ethnography. Through their working, living, talking, and listening together, Jamila and Präa Sepp collaboratively authored a paper on what it means to co-become (Haider & Rieser, 2025): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-05101-6.

Präa Sepp and Jamila are working together on a narrative non-fiction book, Mountain Spacetime: Time, change and sustainability on a thousand year old farm. In a context of a world where industrialized food production has driven biodiversity loss, climate change and social unrest, this story follows a farm that bucks the trend, that runs on principles of circularity and sufficiency by a farmer who becomes truly alive in the face of uncertainty. Through our dialogue and joint voices, we tell the story of an unlikely friendship between a sustainability researcher and dairy farmer, and what we learn from each other along the way: about sustainable food production, politics, curiosity, deep listening and dialogue, and responding to crises with creativity.

In ASSEMBLE we have also conducted a newspaper media anlyasis of the 2024 European farmers’ protests (foucsing on Germany) to understand how farmers are represented, what the problem is presented to be and what solutions are offered.

Two master students at SRC, Pia von den Benken und Sara Matthée are working on their theses. Pia’s thesis focuses on farming processes around cheesemaking. She attends to the multispecies involved and the relations through which the assemblage emerges, using a care lens. She engaged in a short ethnographic farm stay in which she combined participant observation with special attention to non-human actors, and photovoice and semi-structured interviews with farmers and cheesemakers. Sara's focus are human-nature relationships for which she did walking interviews with farmers in a drained peatland in Flachgau. Both spent a month each as farm interns prior to starting their fieldwork.

What do we plan to do next?

Jamila is moving with her family for 6 months to Gastein in 2026 to extend the ethnography. During this time, the Assemble team will host a number of dialogue processes.

Read more about the dialogue processes here »

 

Theoretical Background

What is New Materialism?

New materialist thinking is an interdisciplinary research field engaging with the creation of novelty, drawing on metaphysical concepts of diffraction – the process of particles bending, changing direction to create fundamentally new patterns. It asks how novelty emerges through co-evolving relationships between researchers and subjects, material and nonmaterial, between humans and non-humans. Central to this approach is that a farmer, policy-maker, or researcher, does not (re)act with a clear start and end point in isolation from the world, but rather is continuously acting within an assemblage of the living world. Read our first project paper: "From reflexive co-production to diffractive co-becoming: insights from new materialism for sustainability sciences" by reseracher Jamila Haider & farmer collabotor Präa Sepp: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-05101-6

Assemblage theory

Assemblage theory is a theory of agency which views capacity to act as entangled in complex and ever-changing socio-material interdependencies, where humans negotiate and alter each other’s experiences and possibilities during their embodied interactions with different materialities and governance arrangements. We draw on Lea et al.’s operationalization of Deleuze and Guattari’s original thinking on assemblages which treats policy both as a participant and the means of rearranging the assemblage. In practical terms: the in-depth assemblage co-created and studied in this proposal is comprised of a farmer, a policy-maker and a researcher, with emphasis on their relation to each other and the material-discursive world of which they are a part.

Lea, T., et al. New problems for assemblage thinking: materiality, governance and cycling in Sydney, Australia. J. Environ. Policy Plan. 24, 343–354 (2022).

Curious? Here are some of our literature recommendations: