Peer-Reviewed - Matthew A. Schnurr

Please contact me at matthew.schnurr@dal.ca for copies of any articles that you are unable to access through the links provided.

Shilomboleni, H., & Schnurr, M. A. (2025). Are disruptive agricultural technologies compatible with agroecology? Npj Sustainable Agriculture, 3(1), 21-25.

Agroecology has emerged as a credible approach to achieving sustainable and resilient agrifood systems. But the role for disruptive agricultural technologies within agroecology remains contentious. This paper examines the potential congruence for technology-driven and agroecology-driven approaches to agricultural development. We examine two case studies from east Africa—one focused on user-centered digital technology in Ethiopia and …

Fairbairn, M., Faxon, H.O., Montenegro de Wit, M., Bronson, K., Kish, Z., Ruder, S.L., Ezirigwe, J., Abdella, S., Oguamanam, C., & Schnurr, M.A. (2025). Digital agriculture will perpetuate injustice unless led from the grassroots. Nature Food, 6, 312–315.

Situating digital agriculture within recent histories of uneven agrarian development reveals its potential to perpetuate injustice. To avoid this outcome, we argue for innovation processes that centre the needs, knowledge and priorities of communities who work the land.

Addison, L., Gore, C., Bawa, S., & Schnurr, M.A. (2025). From negotiated to covert: married women’s agency in staple crop value chains in Kenya, Ghana, South Africa and Uganda. Canadian Journal of African Studies, 59(1), 91–112.

This article examines married women’s agency in marketing and income use for staple crops grown on jointly held fields in four African countries: cowpea in Ghana, maize in South Africa and Kenya, and matooke banana in Uganda. The article is based on a series of workshops in each country in which small-scale farmers participated in …

Fischer, K., Crossland-Marr, L., Mollaoglu, E. P., Ely, A., Glover, D., Schnurr, M., & Stone, G. D. (2025). Citizens as consumers: styles of reasoning about agricultural biotechnologies and publics. Science as Culture, 1–23.

In research and policy there is a dominant style of reasoning about the contribution agricultural biotechnologies can make to resolving major global challenges. In this reasoning, consumer scepticism is a major hindrance to deploying biotechnology and there is a significant focus on understanding consumer opinion in order to manipulate it. Analysing the historical role given …

Schnurr, M. A., Gore, C. D., Addison, L., Bawa, S., Taylor, A., Nsereko, H., & Mujabi-Mujuzi, S. (2024). The gendered value chain of matooke banana and its implications for tissue culture adoption in Uganda. Journal of Eastern African Studies, 1–24.

Tissue culture banana is promoted as a form of micro-propagation that can aid farmers in managing pests and disease in Uganda, the country with the largest per capita consumption of banana in the world. But uptake amongst smallholder farmers remains low. This study recruited 71 farmers from five banana-growing districts in Uganda to assess how …

Peer-Reviewed Articles

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