About the project
This project investigated the transformations of intentional fallowing as a practice for soil regeneration and as a tool for sustainability policies. It used this as an entry point into an investigation of the biopolitics of managing and optimising rest, dormancy, and unproductivity.
The project deployed an interdisciplinary approach grounded in philosophy and multispecies ethnography to analyse the persistence, resurgence, and mutation of intentional fallowing practices in European agriculture and policies, and the cultural and scientific dimensions of these shifts.
Fallowed soils was studied as sites where a variety of interests and projects converge, and the project traced how these practices take up or extend questions of productivity and idleness, growth, and alternatives to economic expansion.
Project aims
The project’s overall objective was to provide a comprehensive theoretical account of intentional fallowing as a resurgent practice across sites and disciplines – with a focus on Europe – and of the consequences of this resurgence for contemporary agriculture and conservation.
It combined an ethnographic approach, detailed documentary research into cutting-edge scientific studies, and robust theoretical arguments grounded in philosophical and anthropological concepts.
This way, the project analysed the multiple alliances between farmers, policymakers, microbiologists, and engineers that are created by this resurgent interest in fallowing, and of how their practices respond to specific concerns about productivity sustainability, biosecurity, and extinction.
Duration
01.10.2022 - 30.09.2024
Funding
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2021 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101064934.