Soil Ontologies

More than a decade ago, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization declared that the world has less than sixty years of growing crops with current methods before global topsoil is almost completely destroyed and food supply chains are irrevocably altered. Despite such urgent warnings about the ongoing worldwide degradation of soils – due to intensive farming practices, deforestation, pollution, and climate change – soil remains largely unthought outside industrial agriculture and certain subfields of the environmental sciences.

“Soil Ontologies: Interdisciplinary Learning in Literature and the Agricultural & Biological Sciences” (SOIL-LAB) is a multinational project that brings together French and Nordic scholars in the environmental humanities to consider new ways of integrating knowledge about soil – from biology, microbiology, ecology, hydrology, geology, and other earth sciences – into the study of literature and the arts, and vice versa, to create a transnational network for education and research. It aims to meet recommendations for strengthening the integration of social sciences, humanities, and the arts in future agricultural research under Horizon Europe’s 2030 mission “A Soil Deal for Europe,” with a number of potential grant-funding opportunities to follow the initial 2027-2029 support from the Franco-Nordic Programme.

In the all-but-invisible dirt beneath our feet, SOIL-LAB sees a window into the biological complexities of life and the human ecologies upon which they depend: a murky space between disciplinary knowledge systems calling for research methodologies in the humanities that enable us to more clearly articulate the relations between earth, organism, and society. These are terms that require redefining, theorization, and exemplification made possible through ongoing conversations among scientists and humanities scholars. Amid our increasingly precarious moment – in which democracy as a form of life is itself in danger – SOIL-LAB also seeks to understand the emergent politics of thinking soil in ways that resist ongoing corporate-nationalist configurations of agricultural knowledge, space, and resource management. In other words, SOIL-LAB explores the scientific, literary, political, and theoretical discourses of edaphology, or the mutual influence of soils and living organisms, to consider soil a contested site of reading that produces competing archives and registers certain knowledge systems while effacing others.

Project coordinator

• Tom Nurmi, Professor, NTNU - Faculty of Social and Educational Sciences - Department of Teacher Education.

Network members

France

• Cécile Roudeau, Professor, Université Paris Cité (France); Thomas Dutoit, Professor, Université de Lille (France) and Clara-Louise Mourier, PhD Candidate, Université de Lille (France).

Denmark

• Christa Holm Vogelius, Research Affiliate, University of Southern Denmark.