Global poverty looks radically different in the 21st century as climate-related events, political-religious conflicts and economic growth-inequality nexuses add to persistent forms of social exclusion based on gender, race, and class. In this uncertain and unpredictable context, we require new approaches to understand complex pathways into and out of poverty, directing attention to poor people's collective capacity to bring about transformative change i.e., their agency, as constituted by social networks and relations with nature, and mediated by science and technology. The collection deposited includes the transcripts of life history interviews with anonymised participants in south India and in Kenya. Focus of the interviews was on understanding participants' relations with modern sciences and technologies as well as with social structures. The eventual aim was to understand how these socio-material relations constitute participants' agency. All names are pseudonyms.Global poverty looks radically different in the 21st century as climate-related events, political-religious conflicts and economic growth-inequality nexuses add to persistent forms of social exclusion based on gender, race, and class. In this uncertain and unpredictable context, we require new approaches to understand complex pathways into and out of poverty, directing attention to poor people's collective capacity to bring about transformative change i.e., their agency, as constituted by social networks and relations with nature, and mediated by science and technology. Our aim is to develop the concepts and methods of an innovative 'relational agency pathways approach', drawing on theories from Science, Technology and Society studies and the 'pathways approach' to poverty reduction and social justice, which emphasise interactions between social, technological and environmental change. We will develop this new approach to understand diverse pathways out of poverty for smallholders and the landless in agriculture, in two arenas. First, we will study how small farmers and farmworkers adapt new technologies on the farm, as their cultivation practices are transformed due to technological and environmental change. Second, we will study how farmers turn a harvested crop into a commodity for the market, negotiating their relationships with credit providers and traders. Both these arenas played out dramatically under the 'Green Revolution', from the 1960s onwards, when technology, markets and government support were used to intensify agricultural production. The first geographical focus of our work will be on the North Arcot region of Tamil Nadu, India, a classic exemplar of the Green Revolution in Asia, where extensive historical data since the early 1970s are available. Collaborating with our co-investigators at Madras Institute of Development Studies, and collecting new life history data in the field, we will map long-term agency pathways into and out of poverty constituted by changing technologies, natural resources and social worlds, as lived by people of different genders, classes and castes. We will test the approach in Machakos County in Kenya (in collaboration with our co-investigator at African Centre for Technology Studies), where several attempts have been made to get a Green Revolution off the ground, but none have been sustainable. In addition to relying on archival data and collecting life histories using ethnographic engagement with the study's participants, we will use a workshop format to collect data on how people evaluate diverse pathways out of (and into) poverty along a range of criteria derived from conventional indicators of welfare and well-being as well as those designed by the participants themselves. To communicate our approach in other low-income contexts, we will develop a training programme for junior researchers. There will be broad-based participation from researchers, policymakers and farmers throughout the project, and we will organise a final workshop in Kenya, which will bring these participants together in a safe space for collective learning, where our findings and approach can be confronted with their different knowledges and experiences. We will present our work in academic and policy forums, produce policy briefs and web blogs and a short documentary film (to engage with audiences beyond academia and policy). We see our research to be of interest to at least five groups: a) government institutions attempting to intensify smallholder agriculture through better use of natural resources and new technologies; b) rural development organisations (including non-governmental ones), active in organising initiatives for poverty alleviation; c) academic researchers working on agricultural sustainability and poverty issues in the global south; d) environmental NGOs at international and grassroots levels; e) farmers' associations such as the East African Farmers' Federation.

Oral history interviews (India and Kenya) In south India, we gathered oral histories in two villages of one district. The villages were visited every day for a period of seven months (October 2017 to April 2018). In Kenya, oral histories were collected in Machakos county (from November 2018 to February 2019). We conducted multiple detailed open-ended interviews with each participant. The participants were selected purposefully to include multiple castes and agrarian backgrounds, while achieving gender balance. All interviews were audio recorded. The interviews were conducted in Tamil (India) and Kikamba (Kenya), and the audio recordings were translated into English. The interviews were time-intensive. Many of the interviews lasted more than two hours. They were geared towards grasping people’s perceptions of long-term changes in their lives and agrarian surroundings since the early 1970s. In both regions, significant transformations driven by modernising development have taken place in the last five decades. In the Indian context, many of these transformations are associated with the so-called Green Revolution, and have brought to farms many industrial technologies developed in electrical, mechanical, chemical and biological laboratories and testing grounds. Our focus in such modernising transformations was on the agency of impoverished people, in terms of the many ways in which they negotiate with material interventions in their agrarian lives while also living amidst social structures (like those of caste and gender). Through oral history interviews, we approached people’s memories not as chronological recalling of events in the form of ‘facts’, but rather as reflections on and interpretations of processes of change. Our initial interviews were open-ended as possible and asked participants to recall and elaborate on critical events that shaped their lives. After developing rapport and familiarity we began asking more focused questions about changes in livelihood practices, memories of agricultural industrialisation as well as related processes of transformations in their social, political and economic life. Recognising the difficulties people often encounter in articulating exclusionary experiences and other hardships in their lives, we used a conversational mode so people could enunciate self-representations of classed and gendered positions. Our interviews reveal not just the immutability of such positions but also the possibilities for sociopolitical transformation. Even as they pose interpretive challenges and limitations, valuable about the personal narratives constructed out of oral history interviews, is the collaborative process ( between researchers and interviewees) of assigning multidimensional significance to concepts of agency, power and ways-of-relating.