Robert M. Chiles is an ethics co-funded hire in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education and the Department of Food Science. He received his PhD from the Department of Community & Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Broadly, his research and teaching interests involve examining how agricultural ethics and sustainability are interwoven with the everyday lives of ordinary people. He is currently exploring how the social acceptability of meat has been disrupted and re-negotiated in light of growing controversies over health, food safety, sustainability, and ethics.
This paper examines ways beyond the epistemic limits of our current public narratives of food eth... more This paper examines ways beyond the epistemic limits of our current public narratives of food ethics. We contend that a new food ethics paradigm must transcend the fraught history connecting food waste with discriminatory figurations of race, gender, and class in our social imaginaries in order to build opportunities for representation and agency in hitherto silenced marginalized communities. Thus, we suggest a new food ethics incorporate strategies adapted from standpoint epistemologies and intersectional feminism to construct a multivalent “bottom-up” approach to ethical narratives about food and food waste.
The Sponge City Development (SCD) concept was initiated in 2012 to address severe urban flooding ... more The Sponge City Development (SCD) concept was initiated in 2012 to address severe urban flooding and water quality challenges in China. Green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) such as rain gardens have been adopted as critical stormwater management tools. Existing GSI research has focused primarily on their environmental performance, overlooking the human dimensions. The co-benefits of GSI have been particularly underinvestigated. We used social surveys (n = 607) and expert interviews (n = 11) to explore public perception of SCD and GSI in four pilot sponge cities, examining flood experience, stormwater concerns, GSI familiarity, institutional trust, and GSI benefit perception. The survey found high exposure to flooding, medium GSI familiarity, and strong institutional trust. The public showed greater concern on stormwater impacts on their quality-of-life than the water environment, rating the less-intended aesthetic and health values as the best-perceived benefits. Experience, familiarity, concern, trust, age, and city significantly affected GSI benefit perception. In contrast, the experts spoke more positively about the environmental benefits while indicating the inadequacy of public participation. The case of GSI in SCD offers broad implications for environmental governance and expert-public relationships in an era of rapid social, technological, and environmental change. Refining policies and regulations to incorporate social goals, bringing the public into the SCD process, and building up the GSI industry's capacity in planning, design, construction, and maintenance are critical to enhancing GSI benefits provision. Adopting the co-benefits approach will be essential to utilizing GSI as a place-making tool to create more sustainable and livable communities.
The emergence of the “4th Industrial Revolution,” i.e. the convergence of artificial intelligence... more The emergence of the “4th Industrial Revolution,” i.e. the convergence of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, advanced materials, and bioengineering technologies, could accelerate socioeconomic insecurities and anxieties or provide beneficial alternatives to the status quo. In the post-Covid-19 era, the entities that are best positioned to capitalize on these innovations are large firms, which use digital platforms and big data to orchestrate vast ecosystems of users and extract market share across industry sectors. Nonetheless, these technologies also have the potential to democratize ownership, broaden political-economic participation, and reduce environmental harms. We articulate the potential sociotechnical pathways in this high-stakes crossroads by analyzing cellular agriculture, an exemplary 4th Industrial Revolution technology that synergizes computer science, biopharma, tissue engineering, and food science to grow cultured meat, dairy, and egg products from cult...
The emergence of the "4th Industrial Revolution," i.e. the convergence of artificial in... more The emergence of the "4th Industrial Revolution," i.e. the convergence of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, advanced materials, and bioengineering technologies, could accelerate socioeconomic insecurities and anxieties or provide beneficial alternatives to the status quo. In the post-Covid-19 era, the entities that are best positioned to capitalize on these innovations are large firms, which use digital platforms and big data to orchestrate vast ecosystems of users and extract market share across industry sectors. Nonetheless, these technologies also have the potential to democratize ownership, broaden political-economic participation, and reduce environmental harms. We articulate the potential sociotechnical pathways in this high-stakes crossroads by analyzing cellular agriculture, an exemplary 4th Industrial Revolution technology that synergizes computer science, biopharma, tissue engineering, and food science to grow cultured meat, dairy, and egg products...
Coronavirus is currently dealing a concussive blow to global food systems, but this crisis could ... more Coronavirus is currently dealing a concussive blow to global food systems, but this crisis could also present a rare opportunity to uncover and address longstanding social and environmental problems. The purpose of this paper is to shed additional light on this rapidly developing situation by (i) outlining the vulnerabilities and inequities in the global food system that have been exposed by the coronavirus, (ii) identifying the emergent sociotechnical shifts that have occurred in the initial stages of the post-coronavirus era, and then (iii) interpreting these vulnerabilities, inequities, and shifts from the standpoint of two key theories in environmental sociology: the treadmill of production and ecological modernization.
The complexities of the global agri-food system and the singular importance of food as a primary ... more The complexities of the global agri-food system and the singular importance of food as a primary good elevate the need to explore what corporate social responsibility (CSR) might mean for agri-food firms. Although CSR refers to voluntary actions on the part of capitalist firms to exceed legal and regulatory requirements, those requirements are important because they set the institutional foundation for what a firm must do to earn the CSR label. In the case of CSR for agri-food firms, the institutional context includes the regulatory state as well as the publicly supported agricultural and food research and development that tends to be done at universities. The purpose of this paper is to provide greater conceptual clarity to the blur between the state, agri-food firms, and universities and their respective responsibilities to the public. Since the globalization of the agri-food system and the emergence of private forms of governance signal the decline of the state's legal and re...
This serves as a brief introduction to Part II of the articles presented in the special issue, Qu... more This serves as a brief introduction to Part II of the articles presented in the special issue, Qualitative Research Ethics in the Big-Data Era.
The purpose of this paper is to provide further clarity to the technical and policy difficulties ... more The purpose of this paper is to provide further clarity to the technical and policy difficulties associated with mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture by identifying and distilling the core tensions which propagate and animate them. We argue that these complexities exist across four critical dimensions: the epistemological, the ethical, the political, and the practical. Adequately confronting the challenge of agricultural emissions will require improved transparency in emissions measurement, increased science communication, enhanced public participatory mechanisms, and the integration of ethical deliberation in scientific and policy discussions.
This article examines the developments that have motivated this special issue on Qualitative Rese... more This article examines the developments that have motivated this special issue on Qualitative Research Ethics in the Big Data Era. The article offers a broad overview of many pressing challenges and opportunities that the Big Data era raises particularly for qualitative research. Big Data has introduced to the social sciences new data sources, new research methods, new researchers, and new forms of data storage that have immediate and potential effects on the ethics and practice of qualitative research. Drawing from a literature review and insights gathered at a National Science Foundation-funded workshop in 2016, we present five principles for qualitative researchers and their institutions to consider in navigating these emerging research landscapes. These principles include (a) valuing methodological diversity; (b) encouraging research that accounts for and retains context, specificity, and marginalized and overlooked populations; (c) pushing beyond legal concerns to address often ...
How did meat emerge to become such an important feature in Western society? In both popular and a... more How did meat emerge to become such an important feature in Western society? In both popular and academic literatures, biophysical and political-economic factors are often cited as the reason for meat’s preeminent status. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive investigation of these claims by reviewing the available evidence on the political-economic and biophysical features of meat over the long arc of Western history. We specifically focus on nine critical epochs: the Paleolithic (200,000 YA—10,000 YA), early to late Neolithic (10,000 YA—2500 BCE), antiquity (2500 BCE—550 CE), ancient Israel and early Christian societies (1550 BCE—379 CE), medieval Europe (476 CE—1400 CE), early modern Europe (1400–1800), colonial America (1607–1776), the American frontier (1776–1890), and the modern industrial era (1890—present). We find that except under conditions of environmental scarcity, the meaning and value of meat cannot be attributed to intrinsic biophysical value or to the political-economic actors who materially benefit from it. Rather, meat’s status reflects the myriad cultural contexts in which it is socially constructed in people’s everyday lives, particularly with respect to religious, gender, communal, racial, national, and class identity. By deconstructing the normalized/naturalized materialist assumptions circling around meat consumption, this paper clears a space for a more nuanced appreciation of the role that culture has played in the legitimation of meat, and by extension, the possibility of change.
Abstract Discussions about “disruptive” food controversies abound in popular and academic literat... more Abstract Discussions about “disruptive” food controversies abound in popular and academic literatures, particularly with respect to meat production and consumption, yet there is little scholarship examining what makes an event disruptive in the first instance. Filling this gap will improve our understanding of how food controversies unfold and why certain issues may be more likely to linger in the public consciousness as opposed to others. I address these questions by using focus groups and in-depth interviews to analyze five potentially upsetting topics: dietary warnings about meat consumption, meat safety recalls, eating meat directly from the skull of the animal, the morality of killing animals for food, and the “pink slime” debate. Findings suggest that disruptive events involve negative affective reactions to safety hazards, disgust-provoking sensory cues, and/or ethical dilemmas. When these cues exist in isolation from one another, consumers’ reactions are quite often short-lived, while the simultaneous presence of multiple disruptive elements in the context of a single issue or event can trigger a far stronger reaction.
In this article, I develop the concept of ‘suppressive synergy’ to explain how meat products reta... more In this article, I develop the concept of ‘suppressive synergy’ to explain how meat products retain their everyday legitimacy amongst consumers despite the controversies which surround these products. While sociologists have offered various explanations for and solutions to contemporary food controversies, absent from this literature is a more integrated explanation as to how industry, mass media, and consumers’ everyday habits reciprocally limit the public's engagement with these arguments. I investigated this empirically elusive phenomenon by conducting six focus groups plus follow-up interviews with urban meat consumers in the US and a content analysis of meat-related articles in the New York Times (1983–2011). Findings indicate that suppressive synergy occurs on both spatial-temporal and cognitive-affective dimensions. The meat and livestock industry enchants consumers with ornate products while sequestering production facilities in remote areas. Consumers, resistant to abandon their everyday habits and the cultural imperative of meat consumption, routinely avoid and dissociate themselves from meat-related controversies. The mass media further normalises meat culture by infrequently covering these debates. This only reinforces public indifference, as the dearth of controversial stories bolsters the cultural presupposition that meat consumption is a generally benign activity.
Wisconsin&amp... more Wisconsin's Governor Scott Walker's "Budget Repair Bill" prompted shock—and a large, coordinated response. The authors offer an insider's perspective of a social movement for democratic rights, "Wisconsin-style."
This paper examines ways beyond the epistemic limits of our current public narratives of food eth... more This paper examines ways beyond the epistemic limits of our current public narratives of food ethics. We contend that a new food ethics paradigm must transcend the fraught history connecting food waste with discriminatory figurations of race, gender, and class in our social imaginaries in order to build opportunities for representation and agency in hitherto silenced marginalized communities. Thus, we suggest a new food ethics incorporate strategies adapted from standpoint epistemologies and intersectional feminism to construct a multivalent “bottom-up” approach to ethical narratives about food and food waste.
The Sponge City Development (SCD) concept was initiated in 2012 to address severe urban flooding ... more The Sponge City Development (SCD) concept was initiated in 2012 to address severe urban flooding and water quality challenges in China. Green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) such as rain gardens have been adopted as critical stormwater management tools. Existing GSI research has focused primarily on their environmental performance, overlooking the human dimensions. The co-benefits of GSI have been particularly underinvestigated. We used social surveys (n = 607) and expert interviews (n = 11) to explore public perception of SCD and GSI in four pilot sponge cities, examining flood experience, stormwater concerns, GSI familiarity, institutional trust, and GSI benefit perception. The survey found high exposure to flooding, medium GSI familiarity, and strong institutional trust. The public showed greater concern on stormwater impacts on their quality-of-life than the water environment, rating the less-intended aesthetic and health values as the best-perceived benefits. Experience, familiarity, concern, trust, age, and city significantly affected GSI benefit perception. In contrast, the experts spoke more positively about the environmental benefits while indicating the inadequacy of public participation. The case of GSI in SCD offers broad implications for environmental governance and expert-public relationships in an era of rapid social, technological, and environmental change. Refining policies and regulations to incorporate social goals, bringing the public into the SCD process, and building up the GSI industry's capacity in planning, design, construction, and maintenance are critical to enhancing GSI benefits provision. Adopting the co-benefits approach will be essential to utilizing GSI as a place-making tool to create more sustainable and livable communities.
The emergence of the “4th Industrial Revolution,” i.e. the convergence of artificial intelligence... more The emergence of the “4th Industrial Revolution,” i.e. the convergence of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, advanced materials, and bioengineering technologies, could accelerate socioeconomic insecurities and anxieties or provide beneficial alternatives to the status quo. In the post-Covid-19 era, the entities that are best positioned to capitalize on these innovations are large firms, which use digital platforms and big data to orchestrate vast ecosystems of users and extract market share across industry sectors. Nonetheless, these technologies also have the potential to democratize ownership, broaden political-economic participation, and reduce environmental harms. We articulate the potential sociotechnical pathways in this high-stakes crossroads by analyzing cellular agriculture, an exemplary 4th Industrial Revolution technology that synergizes computer science, biopharma, tissue engineering, and food science to grow cultured meat, dairy, and egg products from cult...
The emergence of the "4th Industrial Revolution," i.e. the convergence of artificial in... more The emergence of the "4th Industrial Revolution," i.e. the convergence of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, advanced materials, and bioengineering technologies, could accelerate socioeconomic insecurities and anxieties or provide beneficial alternatives to the status quo. In the post-Covid-19 era, the entities that are best positioned to capitalize on these innovations are large firms, which use digital platforms and big data to orchestrate vast ecosystems of users and extract market share across industry sectors. Nonetheless, these technologies also have the potential to democratize ownership, broaden political-economic participation, and reduce environmental harms. We articulate the potential sociotechnical pathways in this high-stakes crossroads by analyzing cellular agriculture, an exemplary 4th Industrial Revolution technology that synergizes computer science, biopharma, tissue engineering, and food science to grow cultured meat, dairy, and egg products...
Coronavirus is currently dealing a concussive blow to global food systems, but this crisis could ... more Coronavirus is currently dealing a concussive blow to global food systems, but this crisis could also present a rare opportunity to uncover and address longstanding social and environmental problems. The purpose of this paper is to shed additional light on this rapidly developing situation by (i) outlining the vulnerabilities and inequities in the global food system that have been exposed by the coronavirus, (ii) identifying the emergent sociotechnical shifts that have occurred in the initial stages of the post-coronavirus era, and then (iii) interpreting these vulnerabilities, inequities, and shifts from the standpoint of two key theories in environmental sociology: the treadmill of production and ecological modernization.
The complexities of the global agri-food system and the singular importance of food as a primary ... more The complexities of the global agri-food system and the singular importance of food as a primary good elevate the need to explore what corporate social responsibility (CSR) might mean for agri-food firms. Although CSR refers to voluntary actions on the part of capitalist firms to exceed legal and regulatory requirements, those requirements are important because they set the institutional foundation for what a firm must do to earn the CSR label. In the case of CSR for agri-food firms, the institutional context includes the regulatory state as well as the publicly supported agricultural and food research and development that tends to be done at universities. The purpose of this paper is to provide greater conceptual clarity to the blur between the state, agri-food firms, and universities and their respective responsibilities to the public. Since the globalization of the agri-food system and the emergence of private forms of governance signal the decline of the state's legal and re...
This serves as a brief introduction to Part II of the articles presented in the special issue, Qu... more This serves as a brief introduction to Part II of the articles presented in the special issue, Qualitative Research Ethics in the Big-Data Era.
The purpose of this paper is to provide further clarity to the technical and policy difficulties ... more The purpose of this paper is to provide further clarity to the technical and policy difficulties associated with mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture by identifying and distilling the core tensions which propagate and animate them. We argue that these complexities exist across four critical dimensions: the epistemological, the ethical, the political, and the practical. Adequately confronting the challenge of agricultural emissions will require improved transparency in emissions measurement, increased science communication, enhanced public participatory mechanisms, and the integration of ethical deliberation in scientific and policy discussions.
This article examines the developments that have motivated this special issue on Qualitative Rese... more This article examines the developments that have motivated this special issue on Qualitative Research Ethics in the Big Data Era. The article offers a broad overview of many pressing challenges and opportunities that the Big Data era raises particularly for qualitative research. Big Data has introduced to the social sciences new data sources, new research methods, new researchers, and new forms of data storage that have immediate and potential effects on the ethics and practice of qualitative research. Drawing from a literature review and insights gathered at a National Science Foundation-funded workshop in 2016, we present five principles for qualitative researchers and their institutions to consider in navigating these emerging research landscapes. These principles include (a) valuing methodological diversity; (b) encouraging research that accounts for and retains context, specificity, and marginalized and overlooked populations; (c) pushing beyond legal concerns to address often ...
How did meat emerge to become such an important feature in Western society? In both popular and a... more How did meat emerge to become such an important feature in Western society? In both popular and academic literatures, biophysical and political-economic factors are often cited as the reason for meat’s preeminent status. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive investigation of these claims by reviewing the available evidence on the political-economic and biophysical features of meat over the long arc of Western history. We specifically focus on nine critical epochs: the Paleolithic (200,000 YA—10,000 YA), early to late Neolithic (10,000 YA—2500 BCE), antiquity (2500 BCE—550 CE), ancient Israel and early Christian societies (1550 BCE—379 CE), medieval Europe (476 CE—1400 CE), early modern Europe (1400–1800), colonial America (1607–1776), the American frontier (1776–1890), and the modern industrial era (1890—present). We find that except under conditions of environmental scarcity, the meaning and value of meat cannot be attributed to intrinsic biophysical value or to the political-economic actors who materially benefit from it. Rather, meat’s status reflects the myriad cultural contexts in which it is socially constructed in people’s everyday lives, particularly with respect to religious, gender, communal, racial, national, and class identity. By deconstructing the normalized/naturalized materialist assumptions circling around meat consumption, this paper clears a space for a more nuanced appreciation of the role that culture has played in the legitimation of meat, and by extension, the possibility of change.
Abstract Discussions about “disruptive” food controversies abound in popular and academic literat... more Abstract Discussions about “disruptive” food controversies abound in popular and academic literatures, particularly with respect to meat production and consumption, yet there is little scholarship examining what makes an event disruptive in the first instance. Filling this gap will improve our understanding of how food controversies unfold and why certain issues may be more likely to linger in the public consciousness as opposed to others. I address these questions by using focus groups and in-depth interviews to analyze five potentially upsetting topics: dietary warnings about meat consumption, meat safety recalls, eating meat directly from the skull of the animal, the morality of killing animals for food, and the “pink slime” debate. Findings suggest that disruptive events involve negative affective reactions to safety hazards, disgust-provoking sensory cues, and/or ethical dilemmas. When these cues exist in isolation from one another, consumers’ reactions are quite often short-lived, while the simultaneous presence of multiple disruptive elements in the context of a single issue or event can trigger a far stronger reaction.
In this article, I develop the concept of ‘suppressive synergy’ to explain how meat products reta... more In this article, I develop the concept of ‘suppressive synergy’ to explain how meat products retain their everyday legitimacy amongst consumers despite the controversies which surround these products. While sociologists have offered various explanations for and solutions to contemporary food controversies, absent from this literature is a more integrated explanation as to how industry, mass media, and consumers’ everyday habits reciprocally limit the public's engagement with these arguments. I investigated this empirically elusive phenomenon by conducting six focus groups plus follow-up interviews with urban meat consumers in the US and a content analysis of meat-related articles in the New York Times (1983–2011). Findings indicate that suppressive synergy occurs on both spatial-temporal and cognitive-affective dimensions. The meat and livestock industry enchants consumers with ornate products while sequestering production facilities in remote areas. Consumers, resistant to abandon their everyday habits and the cultural imperative of meat consumption, routinely avoid and dissociate themselves from meat-related controversies. The mass media further normalises meat culture by infrequently covering these debates. This only reinforces public indifference, as the dearth of controversial stories bolsters the cultural presupposition that meat consumption is a generally benign activity.
Wisconsin&amp... more Wisconsin's Governor Scott Walker's "Budget Repair Bill" prompted shock—and a large, coordinated response. The authors offer an insider's perspective of a social movement for democratic rights, "Wisconsin-style."
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