Farmers and social media: animating online communities to build trust and support the development of agroecology

• Title of the project: "Farmers and social media: animating online communities to build trust and support the development of agroecology"; INRAE & Université de Bretagne Occidentale
  • PhD student: Louise Ardoint.
  • Affiliated unit: INRAE UPR 0767 - Écodéveloppement.
  • Co-supervision:
    • Aurélie Cardona (INRAE).
    • Magali Prost (Université de Bretagne Occidentale).
  • Doctoral school: ED 537 Culture et Patrimoine, Avignon Université.
  • Project duration: 2024 – 2027.

Project summary:

The thesis aims to:

• Question how the use of social media can encourage and support long-term changes in agricultural practices.
• Identify the necessary skills to animate such online spaces to contribute to the effective adoption of agroecological practices by farmers.

At the intersection of ergonomics, sociology, and educational sciences, it aims to analyze how the activity of animating online communities of farmers helps to build a framework of trust and its effect on supporting concrete transitions towards agroecological practices in the long term.

The thesis will study and compare, using in situ survey methods and online ethnography methods, the animation activities in several online farmer communities. Specifically, it will compare the animation conducted by "instituted" animators, i.e., professionals of collective animation (e.g., an agricultural technical advisor), with that conducted by "volunteers" (e.g., farmers) participating in the online community, whose animation role has been explicitly or implicitly assigned to them.

In terms of scientific knowledge, this thesis will help strengthen the understanding of the work of animating online communities and the trajectories of online animators. From a methodological point of view, it will contribute to producing a framework for understanding how farmers seize the different sources of information shared within online communities and to evaluating the impact of animation on the actual changes in farmers' practices on their farms. From an operational point of view, this work will identify the possibilities and technical constraints of digital applications on which online communities rely.