Schedule 9th International Degrowth Conference

Soils are a foundational part of relational and interdependent planetary existence; almost all local and global multispecies relations are connected to soils. However, regardless of their centrality to all life, soils as complex multispecies entities, and the wider implications of past and ongoing systemic erasure of soils (due to for example industrial agricultural practices) have only recently become an object of interest in social and multidisciplinary science. The lack of social scientific examinations of soils arises from the literal invisibility of the beings and processes that make soils, but also from soils' role in being taken for granted ontologically and politically. In this article, I build on feminist, decolonial and queer ecological examinations of soils to name what is actively ignored, and to re-centre the complex relationalities and hidden subjectivities of soils, in order to better understand the myriad violences of capitalist modernity within the web-of-life. Through an integrative literature review I examine how specific (non-relational) political ontological understandings of soils are incorporated into industrial agricultural politics in Europe, and led to significantly re-organizing landscapes and different multispecies relations. The theoretical contribution of “soil extractivism” provides a conceptual tool for understanding currently dominant ways of treating soils as a key part of modernity and industrial capitalism. With this contribution I think with the emerging conceptual work within anthropology, political ecology, and feminist and postcolonial studies in conceptualizing capitalist appropriation of material and intangible world(s) as commodification of life in general.

Info

Day: 2023-08-30
Start time: 12:45
Duration: 00:15
Room: ZV-KC-2
Type: Paper Presentation
Theme: Feminist, decolonial, anti-racist and anti-ableist ecologies

Links:

• iCalendar
• My university-profile link