More-than-human humanities research group!

Tag: climate change

Open Call: Soils as Sites of Emergency and Transformation, NESS Conference, Gothenburg, Sweden. Abstract deadline 15 Dec!

Dear soil friends, please consider joining us for “thinking with soils” workshop in Gothenburg, Sweden, 7-9 June 2022, as part of the Nordic Environmental Social Science Conference (NESS). Please note he short deadline for abstracts: 15 December 2021. Draft papers: 20 May 2022. The NESS format allows us to spend concentrated time in a small group of 12-15, meeting in half-day sessions over three consecutive days. Covid-19 permitting, we will hold this workshop in person. If you would like to participate but struggle with the short deadline for abstracts please get in touch!

Workshop chairs:

  • Anna Krzywoszynska, The University of Sheffield (a.krzywoszynska@sheffield.ac.uk)
  • Daniel Münster, Oslo University (daniel.munster@medisin.uio.no)
  • Janna Holmstedt, National Historical Museums, Sweden (janna.holmstedt@shm.se)

Please send abstracts of 150-200 words using this link: https://forms.gle/jsqkrDXEnGSQRtVT9

Background and urgency

The Covid-19 pandemic is seen by some as the latest warning against the intensity of intervention of human worlds into non-human processes and spaces. This latest emergency unfolds, however, against the background of the long and accelerating process of human-induced, global planetary and ecosystem change variously debated as the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, or the Plantationcene.

The most lasting, the most fundamental, and the least address aspect of this ‘slow emergency’ and ongoing transformation relates to soils. When (rarely) discussed in the public sphere, soils are framed as an object of concern, and their degrading state is seen as a cause for alarm (as exemplified e.g. by the creation of the EU Mission for Soil Health and Food). In the Nordic context, soil emergencies are particularly noticeable as global heating-related changes in soil functions and states are having sudden and profound effects on lives, livelihoods, and land-use and inhabitation futures.

Such emergency framings which underpin policy and expert concern around soil change can, however, lack historical and ontological reflexivity around the desired human-soil relations. Beyond this emergency framing, soils are also a site of and a source of transformation. Both historically and today, soils are active participants in the making of human societies and of ecologies. Whereas loss of soils has been linked with societal collapse, reciprocal relations of care can transform societies and ecosystems. Moreover, in contemporary thinking in political and social theory (e.g. Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth, Donna Haraway’s thinking on composting), arts (e.g. the Humus economicus project), and in debates about sustainable farming (e.g. regenerative agriculture), relations with soils are a source of inspiration for new models of human-environmental interaction and for conceptualising more-than-human health. This new wave of ‘thinking with soils’ works across disciplinary boundaries to reconceptualise people, environments, and their interactions by acknowledging and interrogating human entanglement with soils.

Invitation: ‘a thinking with soils workshop’

We invite you to spend time together thinking through and getting to grips with our soil past, presents and futures in the context of the Nordic Environmental Social Science Conference (NESS) 7-9th June 2022. Covid-19 permitting, we will hold this workshop in person.

The NESS format allows us to spend concentrated time in a small group of 12-15, meeting in half-day sessions over three consecutive days. While the final format of our workshop depends on who responds to this call, we broadly envisage spending time in a structured manner discussing and workshopping one another’s ideas, and jointly discovering new directions of thought and forms of engagement. We envisage concluding the workshop by collaboratively building ‘a toolbox’ of ideas and practices for making the case for soils as societal actors.

As a workshop contributor, you are asked to share with others in the workshop group a paper (complete or in draft), a photo-essay, a movie (with accompanying essay), or a website (with accompanying essay) which you would like others to engage with. In the workshop, we will ask you to present this contribution very briefly, and to participate in a shared discussion on themes relating to the contribution. We will also ask you to read or view at least two other contributions and engage with them deeply in the workshop.

We ask you to share with us an abstract by 15th December 2021, and a full contribution (which can be a draft or working paper) by 20th May 2022. If you would like to participate but struggle with the short deadline for abstracts please get in touch!

Please send abstracts of 150-200 words using this link: https://forms.gle/jsqkrDXEnGSQRtVT9

We broadly invite contributors to engage with the emergent thought on human-soil relations through the framing of emergency and transformation. This may include reflecting on the following questions, and related issues:

  • What are new, meaningful and interesting ways for thinking through current and past socio-ecological emergencies in relation to human-soil linkages?
  • How do soils or particular relations with soils contribute to the creation of emergencies, and how do they participate in transformations?
  • How can we transform current thinking about socio-ecological transformations by thinking with soils? What conceptual, affective, and ethical modes arise from soil engagements?
  • What forms of methodological and experimental practice can help us transform our thinking, or those of specific groups? What are emergent methodologies for a social science and humanities engagement with soils?
  • How are relations with soils and land drawn on and transformed in response to ecological and social emergencies, including economic and health impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic?

We invite empirical and theoretical papers related to the theme, as well as artistic commentaries and interventions.

Further information from NESS conference organisers:

The NESS workshops follow a standing session format (similar to ECPR), which allows for substantive discussions on research in progress.  The conference invites scholars from multiple disciplinary backgrounds in environmental social science.  The overall objective of the workshop is to facilitate and encourage participation, equality and collaboration between younger and more established scholars.  Each paper is expected to relate to the theme of the workshop, and the participant submits and presents a paper (or work in progress) for the discussion.  Workshop participants will be asked to comment on at least one other paper in the respective workshop and participate in the general discussion of the other papers presented.  Participants should only choose and attend one workshop for the duration of the conference.  The ambition with this format is that the workshops allow for in-depth and coherent discussions of the respective themes and provide opportunity for potential joint publications or other continuing collaborations between the participants

Humus economicus – Launching a four-year art and research project!

We’re happy to announce that The Posthumanities Hub researcher Dr. Janna Holmstedt has received a four-year research grant from Formas, a Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development for Humus economicus: Soil Blindness and the Value of “Dirt” in Urbanized Landscapes.

This art and research project inquiries into the value and future of soil in urbanized landscapes. It seeks to draw attention to radically altered human-soil relations, the invisible work of soils, and practices of soil care in a time when soils are sealed and degraded at rapid rates.

The research team consists of Janna Holmstedt (Pi), National Historical Museums, Sweden (SHM), Christina Fredengren, SHM, Malin Lobell, artist and gardener, Jenny Lindblad, KTH, Cecilia Åsberg, LiU, and Karin Wegsjö, filmmaker and director.

Through the Humus Economicus Collaboratory we will gather artists, scientists, environmental-, urban-, gender-, and heritage scholars, and connect with a growing number of soil stewards to counteract soil blindness, decolonize conceptualizations of nature, and transform public knowledge and imaginaries of soils.

The project explores how multiple forms of inheritance and potential futures meet in the subject of soil, and what societies that strive to be sustainable could learn from it.  Soils tie together political ecologies into conflict zones where nature and culture, human and non-human cannot easily be discerned and held apart. Humus economicus intends to stay with these troubles. It also recognizes that soil is not a charismatic other, as whales for example, which manages to mobilize empathy and action. Soil is rather uncharismatic and constitutes a wider form of bio-agency. How then, to call forth embodied knowledge of, and empathy with, an environment that to a large extent is invisible, difficult to grasp, uncharismatic, and which is being altered in anthropogenic ways?

Read more at the Humus economicus website!

CLIMAVORE – How We Eat as Humans Change Climate 

Cooking Sections: CLIMAVORE On Tidal Zones, 2018.
Performance part of Meetings on Art, La Biennale di Venezia – Biennale Arte 2019, November 2019. Credit Marco Franceschin. Courtesy Delfina Foundation and Arts Council England.

As part of The Posthumanities Hub Seminar Series, we are exited to present Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe), a duo of spatial practitioners based out of London exploring how forms of extraction and intensive agriculture and aquaculture can be approached through other forms of eating. Don’t miss this opportunity to cross the boundaries between visual arts, science, architecture, ecology and geopolitics with us!
Curator Caroline Elgh Klingborg from Bonniers konsthall will also join the discussion.

When: 4th March, 13:15-15
Where: in the big seminar room at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH (Teknikringen 74 D, Level 5, Stockholm).
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Also, another event 4th March, 18:00 at Bonniers konsthall: Cooking Sections in conversation with Daniel Lindvall and Caroline Elgh Klingborg.
Read more the talk at Bonniers konsthall


ABOUT THE SEMINAR:
How We Eat as Humans Change Climate 

CLIMAVORE is a long-term project initiated by Cooking Sections in 2015. It sets out to envision seasons of food production and consumption that react to human-induced climatic events and landscape alterations. Different from the now obsolete cycle of spring, summer, autumn and winter, CLIMAVORE rethinks the construction of space and infrastructure by focusing on how climate alterations offer a new set of clues to adapt our diet to them. Unexpected climatic phenomena, like subsidence, flash floods or drought, may span minutes, days, months, years or centuries. CLIMAVORE is then proposed as a form of devouring following their effects on anthropogenic landscapes. Unlike carnivore, omnivore, locavore, vegetarian or vegan, CLIMAVORE is not only about the origin of ingredients, but also about the agency that those ingredients have in providing spatial and infrastructural responses to human-induced climatic events for a certain period of time. At the core is to embrace a flexible form of eating, shifting, for instance, to drought resistant crops in a period of water scarcity or filter feeders during times of polluted or acidified waters.

For the upcoming exhibition at Bonniers Konsthall, Cooking Sections will continue to explore how forms of extraction and intensive agriculture and aquaculture can be approached through other forms of eating. Building on the work developed on the Isle of Skye in the past years CLIMAVORE is seeking to divest away from intensive salmon farming and develop regenerative aquacultures. The exhibition will be an opportunity to explore the role of salmon in the Scandinavian context, the construction of salmon as an invented synthetic colour and artificial species, and the toll its farming and production of feed pellets takes on communities in countries such as Peru, Chile and Senegal. Furthermore a new project will look into histories of runoff and expand the understanding of eutrophication of the Baltic Sea, as a way to address the changing relations between the human and the non-human, the natural and the cultural.

To learn more about CLIMAVORE click here or watch a short film.


About Cooking Sections Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) is a duo of spatial practitioners based out of London. It was born to explore the systems that organise the WORLD through FOOD. Using installation, performance, mapping and video, their research-based practice explores the overlapping boundaries between visual arts, architecture, ecology and geopolitics. In 2016 they opened The Empire Remains Shop, a platform to critically speculate on implications of selling the remains of Empire today. Their first book about the project was published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.

Cooking Sections was part of the exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion, 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Their work has also been exhibited at the 13th Sharjah Biennial; Manifesta12, Palermo; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; Serpentine Galleries, London; Atlas Arts, Skye; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Storefront for Art & Architecture, New York; Peggy Guggenheim Collection; HKW Berlin; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; and have been residents in The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London. Their work has been featured in a number of international publications (Lars Müller, Sternberg Press, Volume, Frieze Magazine amongst others). They currently lead a studio unit at the Royal College of Art, London. They have recently been awarded the Special Prize at the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize and are nominated for the Visible Award.

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