SOILS has set three objectives:
- Develop knowledge about dispersed and little-known technologies and practices of soil repair in landscapes damaged by industrial agriculture, or radioactive and toxic legacies
- Explore the role of relational and multispecies soil imaginaries in technoscience, agriculture, literature, and the arts for building more sustainable futures
- Create awareness of soils as living multispecies ecologies responsive to human care, both within academia and in the public sphere
Closely collaborating in five work packages, SOILS combines ethnographic, multispecies and praxiographic methodologies with speculative and artistic research to generate new knowledge about emergent human-soil relations.
Our empirical case studies (WP2 and WP3) study multispecies technologies (plants, fungi, bacteria) of restoring soil health in relation to specific ecological and health challenges. Project members examine sites representing a range of regional (Global South, Global North, post-Soviet East) and economic (agriculture, industry) soil-related hotspots: