Reading group on soils - this meeting will be on soil care & ethics, responsibility & attentiveness towards soils.
Soil can be seen as a three-dimensional living infrastructure, containing biological, mineral and organic compounds, entangled with life above ground (Salazar et al. 2022, p. 1). Soils are vital for sustaining most of life on earth, and yet they have been colonised and exploited (De la Bellacasa 2022, p. xiv). Largely due to human activities, today's global soil crisis sees a large part of soils degraded, depleted or contaminated, resulting in a "running out of topsoil" (Salazar et al. 2022, p. 3). Despite soil's importance to all life and the spiritual and cultural relations that humans have with it, this matter remains still "un-theorized" (Tironi et al. 2022, p. 19) in the social sciences and the humanities.
This is the second time we initiate a reading group on soils - it is open to everyone from any discipline (its totally ok to only come to one meeting). During the last reading session, we decided to read for this time three articles by Anna Krzywoszynska. We agreed, that it is not necessary to read all articles, you can also come with different readings or knowledge on that topic, or simply with your own curiosity!
We will meet on Friday 20.03.2026 at NORCE in meeting room F403 (building 3, floor 4). NORCE is located in forskningsparken, which you enter through the main entrance to access NORCE.
Readings (let me know if you don't have access):
Krzywoszynska, A. 2019. Caring for soil life in the Anthropocene: The role of attentiveness in more‐than‐human ethics. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.
Krzywoszynska, A. 2020. Nonhuman Labor and the Making of Resources Making Soils a Resource through Microbial Labor. Environmental Humanities 12(1).
Krzywoszynska, A. 2020. To Know, To Dwell, To Care: Towards an Actionable, Place-based Knowledge of Soils. In Thinking with Soils : Material Politics and Social Theory, edited by Juan Francisco Salazar, et al., Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.