Short Abstract

The panel explores the fragility of ground at a time when both the Earth beneath us and the onto-epistemic foundations of shared worlds erode, collapse, or are actively repaired. We invite reflections on ecological, existential, social, and epistemic erosions, their conditions and implications.

Long Abstract

Across diverse contexts, people sense that the ground beneath them – both literally and metaphorically – is becoming unstable. This panel explores ground as a conceptual and ethnographic problem that joins material, ecological processes with social, epistemological, and ontological ones. On the one hand, soils erode, permafrost thaws, coastlines retreat, grasslands undergo desertification, infrastructures crack – the very materialities that sustain life lose their solidity. On the other, social worlds fracture through polarisation and insularisation (Simonič and Oroz 2025), conspiracy cultures, contested expertise, and the weakening of shared grounds of knowledge, trust, and collective orientation. Rather than treating these domains separately, we ask what becomes thinkable when they are held together: Was ground ever solid (cf. Heidegger 1991)? As Ingold (2004) argues, modern knowledge traditions have long cultivated a kind of “groundlessness,” elevating abstract ways of knowing above embodied, earthly life. How, then, do bodies, communities, and multispecies assemblages touch ground (Dolar 2008) in conditions where both earth and meaning give way? And what does it mean to inhabit the cracks as ground recedes?

We invite ethnographic, theoretical, and multimodal contributions that engage with (but are not limited to):

• encounters with worlds that are “losing ground” or even becoming “groundless”;

• the material fragility of landscapes and its social, affective, and economic effects;

• practices of care, maintenance, and symbolic re-grounding through labour, ritual, storytelling, memory work, futuring, activism, commoning, etc. (Bajič 2023);

• shifting, eroding, or contested infrastructures of land, territory, and resource extraction (Dalakoglou 2010; Povoroznyuk et al. 2022);

• relations that build, unsettle, or redistribute ground / soil, including their multispecies entanglements (Ögmundardóttir and Bragason 2024) or geosocialities (Palsson & Swanson 2016).

• the entanglement of environmental rupture with political polarisation and future imaginaries (Bajič & Svetel 2023).

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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