How do particular soil care practices participate in wider socio-ecological transformations?

The productivity and sustainability of industrial agriculture is currently under threat, in a series of highly publicized crises. Institutionalised alienation from non-human others, through exclusion, instrumentalization, and objectification, have led to the systematic degradation of that on which agriculture relies – complex relations with plants, soils, microbial and animal others.

The research will explore innovative agroecological practices which buck this trend by consciously paying attention to and fostering entanglements with soils as a means of agricultural regeneration, bringing in soil life as essential to the maintenance and regeneration of agricultural ecologies.

The aim is to explore the novel possibilities offered by such ‘probiotic’ practices, in terms of new models of human-environmental interaction, concepts of more-than-human health, knowledge practices, and politics.