About

Joeva Sean Rock is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stony Brook University. She employs ethnographic methods to investigate the politics of development, agricultural change, and technology. Her research spans nearly a decade focusing on the complex and contested global effort to introduce genetically modified crops to Ghana. She examines the dynamics of power and actors across multiple scales, from multinational corporations to Ghanaian farmers, and how these influence foodways. Her book, "We are not starving: The Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Ghana," which presents this research, was awarded the 2024 Margaret Mead Award by the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology. Her research has received funding from prestigious organizations including the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the British Academy. Her work has been published in various academic and popular outlets such as African Affairs, Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment, Development & Change, The Nation, Nature Bioengineering, and Foreign Policy in Focus. Additionally, her research has been featured in media outlets like The Economist and the Associated Press. Joeva Sean Rock holds a PhD and MA in Anthropology from American University and a BA in International Studies from the University of California-San Diego. Prior to her current position, she held lectureships at the University of Cambridge and University of California-Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at New York University and Dalhousie University.

Research topics

• Biotechnology
• Computer Science
• Biology
• Ecology
• Political Science
• Genetics
• Geography
• Law

Selected publications

• Peer Review Report For: Farmers’ and stakeholders’ views on the adoption of agroecological practices. Results from participatory workshops in European countries [version 2; peer review: 1 approved, 1 approved with reservations]

  2026-01-07

  peer-review1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Seeds of Discourse: A Multilingual Corpus of Direct Quotations from African Media on Agricultural Biotechnologies

  2025-01-01

  articleOpen access

  Direct quotations play a crucial role in journalism by substantiating claims and enhancing persuasive communication.This makes news articles a rich resource for opinion mining, providing valuable insights into the topics they cover.This paper presents the first multilingual corpora (English and French) featuring both manually annotated (1,657) and automatically extracted (102,483) direct quotations related to agricultural biotechnologies from a curated list of Africa-based news sources.In addition, we provide 665 instances annotated for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis, enabling a finegrained examination of sentiment toward key aspects of agricultural biotechnologies.These corpora are freely available to the research community for future work on media discourse surrounding agricultural biotechnologies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Socio-economic assessment and genetically engineered crops in Africa: Building knowledge for development?

  Global Food Security · 2024-06-29 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  How could we know if agricultural development interventions make contributions to sustainable development goals (SDGs)? Genetically engineered (GE) crops are celebrated as a class of technological interventions that can realize multiple SDGs. But recent studies have revealed the gap between GE crop program goals and the approaches used to assess their impacts. Using four comprehensive reviews of GE crop socio-economic impacts, we identify common shortcomings across three themes: (a) scope, (b) approaches and (c) heterogeneity. We find that the evaluation sciences literature offers alternative assessment approaches that can enable evaluators to better assess impacts, and inform learning and decision-making. We recommend the use of methods that enable evaluations to look beyond the agronomic and productive effects of individual traits to understand wider socio-economic effects.

  PublisherDOI

• The future is only the beginning

  Elementa Science of the Anthropocene · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Recent advancements in genome editing have captured the attention of scientists and policymakers, who contend that the technology has a large role to play in advancing food and climate security on the African continent. However, the modest results of earlier generations of biotechnology—such as genetically modified (GM) crops—raise questions about the sustainability of new technological interventions. This special feature examines lessons learned from previous generations of GM crops and other agricultural technologies, using them to analyze the portfolio of gene edited crops being developed for African farmers today. In this article, we introduce the 6 papers that make up the special feature by way of examining future-oriented discourses around the advancement of genome editing. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies, political ecology, and critical development studies, this introduction highlights the crucial factors that shape technology development, agricultural practice, and the politics of knowing and emphasizes the need to look toward multiple, diverse futures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ways forward and ways past: examining the roots of the new Green Revolution in Africa

  Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems · 2024-06-07

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• BioMAISx: A Corpus for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis of Media Representations of Agricultural Biotechnologies in Africa

  2024-10-20

  articleOpen access

  News articles constitute a valuable resource for opinion mining, as they contain important perspectives related to the subject matter they cover. In this paper, we explore how aspect-based sentiment analysis might help in understanding the public discourse surrounding agricultural biotechnologies in Africa. We introduce BioMAISx, the first English language dataset composed of direct quotes pertaining to agricultural biotechnologies extracted from a curated list of Africa-based news sources. We have identified and labelled entities related to key aspects of agricultural biotechnologies, providing valuable insights into public discourse. This dataset can aid in identifying challenges, improving public discourse, and monitoring the perception of agricultural biotechnologies, thus contributing to informed decision-making.

  PublisherDOI

• “No one is talking about food”: making agriculture a “business” in Ghana

  Agriculture and Human Values · 2023-03-17 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract At the turn of the 21st century, a collection of donors created the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) to spark a “new” Green Revolution on the African continent. Since its inception, AGRA’s mission has revolved around a series of interventions designed around the idea of making agriculture a “business.” In this paper, I ask how AGRA puts such discourses into practice with a particular focus in Ghana. To do so, I draw on a television show produced by AGRA called Kuapa , organizational literature, and to a lesser extent, interviews, to assess how AGRA materializes its goals in Ghana. Ultimately, I argue that a focus on discourse not only provides insight into how AGRA conceptualizes agricultural transformation, but also how AGRA pursues agronomic, political, and social changes in the countries in which it intervenes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The scientific narrative around new food technologies needs to change

  Nature Reviews Bioengineering · 2023-10-04 · 8 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Review: <i>The Scarcity Slot: Excavating Histories of Food Security</i>, by Amanda Logan

  Gastronomica The Journal of Food and Culture · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In The Scarcity Slot: Excavating Histories of Food Security, Amanda Logan argues that African foodways are persistently depicted as lacking in abundance, taste, and history.They are portrayed, she argues, as static and unchanging, and at the mercy of overly harsh environments.Such depictions, which Logan calls ''the scarcity slot,'' are pervasive in popular media, development policy directives, archaeological studies, and beyond.The issue with such descriptions, Logan argues, is that they don't hold up to scrutiny.As an archaeologist, Logan is interested in tracking-and challenging-claims of scarcity across time, and as an archaeologist, she is well poised to do so.The Scarcity Slot delves into a long food history of Banda, a town in western Ghana, beginning in the 1400s and ending in the present, taking the reader through major moments in time, including the introduction of crops such as maize, a 250-year drought, slaving raids, political unrest, colonial rule, and the neoliberal, postcolonial moment.Logan explores how these major political-economic, social, and climatic events significantly altered foodways and livelihoods in Banda.Additionally, and importantly, Logan highlights how residents of Banda deployed creative strategies, deep knowledge, and flexible techniques to weather these events.Archaeological methods-combined with archival research and oral histories-allow Logan to cast a long temporal net.In doing so, she joins politicalecologists and critical agronomists, among others, who have continually stressed the ingenuity and resourcefulness of African farmers amidst popular narratives that would suggest otherwise (Berry 1993;Nyantakyi-Frimpong 2020).For those of us not trained in archaeology, Logan leads with clarity, carefully explaining her methods and analysis.Throughout the book she builds a strong argument for using excavation of soil, of histories, of cuisines as a key method for food studies.Anecdotally, I've taught the book in both undergraduate and graduate classes in development studies and have found that it provides students with a sturdy discussion starter on how narratives of scarcity obfuscate the political economy of food and the agency and empirical realities of African farmers.Zooming out, it's not difficult to find examples of such narratives-or the scarcity slot-out in the world.Just open the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's latest Goalkeepers report, read an NPR article about fufu (Shields 2015), or consider the use of the term ''orphan crops'' (Dwyer, Ibe, and Rhee 2022).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Bridging the gap? Public–private partnerships and genetically modified crop development for smallholder farmers in Africa

  Plants People Planet · 2023-11-01 · 17 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Societal Impact Statement Genetically modified (GM) crops have the potential to address multiple challenges for African smallholder farmers but are limited by several institutional constraints. Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are seen as an organizational fix to one such constraint, bringing privately held intellectual property rights on key crop technologies to African public institutions to develop GM crops for smallholder farmers. Here, a new comprehensive dataset of GM crops in Africa is used to understand the extent and efficacy of PPP‐led GM crop development for smallholder farmers and discuss what might limit their potential in the future. Summary Genetically modified (GM) crops are promoted as a key tool to address multiple challenges in Africa, including the impacts of climate change and food insecurity. Observers have noted, however, significant institutional challenges to achieving such goals, most notably, intellectual property rights (IPR) to key GM traits being held by private companies who have limited incentives to develop those technologies for smallholder farmers. To bridge the gap between privately held IPR and pro‐poor crop breeding, advocates have called for increased funding for institutional innovations such as public–private partnerships (PPPs) to facilitate the transfer of crop technologies from private companies to public research institutes. For the past two decades, donors and firms have invested considerable resources toward PPPs. However, to date, few research efforts have empirically examined the extent and effectiveness of PPPs at the continental scale. This study draws from a new comprehensive dataset on GM crop research and development in Africa to examine whether the anticipated advantages of PPPs have resulted in an improved ability to deliver GM crops to smallholder farmers. We find that although PPP research has focused on crops and traits more relevant for smallholder farmers, many of these efforts have been suspended, with only one crop thus far reaching the hands of farmers. PPPs can address some issues related to GM crop development but still appear constrained by other institutional challenges, which may limit their development, reach, and the achievement of targeted benefits for smallholder farmers.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Brian Dowd‐Uribe

  University of San Francisco

  7 shared

• Ann Kingiri

  5 shared

• Dominic Glover

  Institute of Development Studies

  4 shared

• Matthew A. Schnurr

  Dalhousie University

  4 shared

• Sélim Louafi

  Institut Agro Montpellier

  4 shared

• Trevor Spreadbury

  University of Illinois Chicago

  4 shared

• Genowefa Blundo‐Canto

  Institut National de Recherche pour l'Agriculture, l'Alimentation et l'Environnement

  4 shared

• Klara Fischer

  Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

  4 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Anthropology

  Stony Brook University

Awards & honors

• 2024 Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological A…