Environmental humanities gathering #71: Soils reading group
Is there any interest in a reading group on soils? — this can include topics on soil ontologies, soil health, land and soil, soil relationality, soil in architecture, agriculture, art, politics and so on.
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.
We will meet on Monday 23.02.2026 at NORCE to discuss three chapters from the book Thinking with Soils.
Salazar et. al (2020). Thinking with Soils — Material Politics and Social Theory. Bloomsbury publishing https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/thinking-with-soils-9781350109599/
— Chapter 1: Thinking-with Soils: An Introduction to the Edited Volume (Juan F. Salazar, Céline Granjou, Anna Krzywoszynska, Matthew Kearns, Manuel Tironi)
— Chapter 2: Soil Theories: Relational, Decolonial, Inhuman (Manuel Tironi, Matthew Kearnes, Anna Krzywoszynska, Céline Granjou and Juan Francisco Salazar)
— Chapter 4: Soils and Commodification (Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro and Levi Van Sant)
Please get in touch if you don’t have access to the readings!
If you only manage parts of the readings or none of them but would like to discuss soils anyways, then do come! We’ll meet a second time on 16.03.2026 from 13:30-15h (tavla to come). NORCE is located at Siva Innovasjonssenter, Sykehusveien 21, 9019 Tromsø