friction team
Barbara Van Dyck
For some time now, I have wondered why stories produced within universities are often considered as more truthful and valuable than those emerging from the fields? Since when, after all, have researchers known more about agriculture than farmers? These and other questions have led me to study the politics of knowledge and technology in agriculture.
Today, I am concerned about the rapid spread of AI-powered farm software applications, automated machinery, drones, gene editing and other capital-intensive technologies, which are increasingly promoted as the only viable path forward for farmers. At the same time, hesitance and refusal of these technologies are too easily dismissed as oriented to the past. This is why I ask questions that may help us imagine more precautionary approaches to the possibly radical –and yet largely unknown—transformations the digital economy and its sustaining infrastructure are set to impose on agriculture and society at large. With this research— and working closely with grassroots organizations, NGOs and researchers from different disciplines— I hope to contribute to opening up futures that work for farmers and other landworkers in Belgium and beyond, and that sustain both thriving ecologies and just food systems.
Trained as a bio-engineer and later drawn into the social sciences, I have been fortunate to learn ways of studying agriculture without being confined by disciplinary or institutional boundaries. Both in my academic research and commitments beyond the university, I pay close attention to how the politics of technology intertwine with agricultural pasts, presents and futures. After working as a Marie-Curie fellow at the Science, Policy and Research Unit at the University of Sussex and as an associate professor at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience at Coventry University, I now lead the friction project at the Agroecology Lab at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Some of my work can be found here.
Coline Prévost
As a member of the friction team and a PhD researcher, supervised both by Barbara Van Dyck and Marjolein Visser (Agroecology Lab). I study dairy farm technologies, such as milking robots, connected collars and grass measuring devices – and their impacts on farming practices. Working closely with social movements and Walloon farmers’ unions, I want to question the current moment by understanding how the advent of Big Tech corporations is taking shape on Belgian dairy farms, and how this challenges farmers’ autonomy and connection with their lands and animals – mainly grasslands and dairy cows.
How did I arrive here? After an interdisciplinary education in social sciences and literature, I worked for a year in peasant-like farms before doing a master’s degree in agroecology. My master’s thesis led me to consider the challenges of technological sovereignty in agriculture and sparked my interest in grassroot innovation processes. I am also a 2025 HERA award laureate in sustainable food systems for my master’s thesis.
I am currently reflecting on the transformations agriculture is going through, and how these changes interfere with farming practices. While the recent re-election of Trump catalyzed fears of growing techno-fascism, it is harder to critically engage with technologies when it comes to agriculture. How does the rise of Big Tech impact farmers, rural territories and the more-than-human worlds? How to look at digitalisation of agriculture beyond its promises? The consequences of mineral extraction for digital infrastructure and the operation of data-centers are increasingly visible, yet its socio-environmental effects on agriculture and society remain harder to grasp.
I aim to document – and advocate for – farming practices and knowledges that are vital to desirable futures, yet risk being erod or absorbed by capital-intensive and data-driven technologies.
Danya Nadar
Upon joining friction my research has focused mostly the ways settler colonial technologies learn and appropriate ancestral land relations related to seeds, crops, and knowledges, and finds different ways of attempting to rupture these relations. It is with this framework the research I am interested in pursuing at friction is related to drip irrigation systems and the logics of land and water usurpation embedded within these technologies.
My work at friction is two-fold. First, I co-support the smooth cohesion of our team internally such as communications, finances, technical capacity, team building. I also try to think of ways of expanding our work outside the walls of the Agroecology lab, and the ULB. This is done through pursuing fundraising opportunities and external communication strategies and diffusion of our work. Second, my research interests has been the incorporation of smart digital technologies historically used in military precision killing that are translated onto agricultural fields. I am interested in how these technologies are adopted in Europe with a comparative lens into how they get translated in countries of the global South. Often these technologies and the structures that support them (i.e. policies, economies, technologies) are first tested with European and North American farmers or farmers with large tracts of land, like in Brazil, before they get sent and reworked in other places. I try to “follow-the-technology” and trace that movement between geographies.
I am in the final stages of my PhD, looking at the ways irrigation infrastructures have made Palestinian and Ch’orti’ Maya deserts bloom from the 19th century colonization to today.
Larissa Mies Bombardi
My work has always been driven by the need to understand how global capitalism reshapes agriculture and rural life. For more than a decade, I have studied the social, environmental, and political impacts of pesticides on communities in Brazil, while also tracing how agribusiness consolidates its power—whether through land rents, peasant dispossession, or the imposition of technologies ranging from chemical fertilizers to drones and artificial intelligence.
Today, as a researcher in the Agroecology Lab at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, I am part of the friction project, where I examine how the European Union designs and implements policies to promote the digitalisation of agriculture under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). My focus is on how lobbying by corporations—from pesticide producers to Big Tech—shapes these policies and how digitalisation and artificial intelligence are reframing not only farming practices but also the very governance of agriculture.
Alongside this, I remain engaged in international initiatives seeking to establish a binding global framework for the elimination of highly hazardous pesticides. I am currently on leave from my position as professor in the Department of Geography at the University of São Paulo, where I worked for many years at the interface of research, teaching, and public engagement.
Marjolein Visser
Friction is supported by Professor Marjolein Visser whose long-standing work on agroecology and agrarian systems has been pivotal bringing a systemic approach to the Agroecology Lab. Friction further advances Prof. Visser’s work by placing agricultural practices and technology in its wider social ecological and economic networks.
