Lukas H. Seidler

I am a PhD candidate exploring the materialities and politics of how harvesting is being automated. Specifically, I will do a multispecies ethnography of the development of a harvesting robot.

My interests lie in-between political ecology, environmental humanities, STS, and critical cultural theory, focusing on sensory, experimental, and collaborative methodologies.

In my PhD project I aim to trace the circulations of capital and planetary patchiness that practices of automating harvesting emerge through. Drawing on a multispecies lens, I will be especially attentive to the multiplicity of perspectives that are embodied in these spaces (plants, bats, insects, robots, humans). 

This could for example highlight how such manifold and indeterminate materialities are mobilised as part of various political economic regimes, capitalist and otherwise. In conducting such an ethnography, a key focus is also to collaborate on what a ‘lab’ becomes across the engineers, biologists, and scholars in the social sciences and humanities.

The project aims to contribute to current conversations between feminist new materialisms, political economy of agriculture, and STS.