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- Convenors:
-
Ana Svetel
(University of Ljubljana)
Tomislav Oroz (University of Zadar)
Blaž Bajič (University of Ljubljana)
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- Formats:
- Panel
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).
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
On the volcanic island of Stromboli, the islanders lives with the eruptive activity as part of their daily lives. Far from becoming a source of fear, it is what makes the ‘stability’ of their island. This is the basis of a particular geosociality in which silence is terrifying and growl, reassuring.
Paper long abstract
On the island of Stromboli, Sicily, the population is used to the constant rumble of ‘their’ volcano. Spewing incandescent material, ashes and hot gas multiple times per hour, Stromboli is considered one of the most active volcanoes in the world. Yet, for the few hundred inhabitants, this constant activity is not a threat, a potential danger, as it is their normality. This is the basis of a particular ‘geosocial paradigm’, in which the instability of the very ground is what makes it stable.
Based on long-term ethnographic research conducted on the island, I propose to explore the intimate geosocial relationships that develop between the strombolani and the volcano. Far from becoming groundless, it builds on the movement. While a heightened activity can make one feel “cautious” as one interlocutor told me, the silence of the volcano is source of 'fear'. When the ground ‘stabilise’, many of my interlocutors reported being afraid, considerably more so than when they can “feel that Lui [him] is alive”. In relation to James Hutton’s “deep-time”, I argue that coliving with an active volcano consent being aligned with the ‘shallowness’ of the geos, its rapid evolution. In other words, the strombolani don’t need to learn how to live on a moving, unstable and breathing earth; they don’t have to ‘realise’ its intrinsic instability. From the shallow, volcanic context of Stromboli, this presentation is an invitation to think of the various geosocialities with a ground that, even if at an imperceptible rate, is always moving.
Paper short abstract
In post-mining Krušné hory, residents navigate unstable physical and symbolic ground. This paper explores how perception, memory, and affect shape ambiguous landscapes, using the figure/ground relation to examine shifting attachments to place.
Paper long abstract
In the Krušné hory region of northern Bohemia, brown coal extraction has reshaped not only the physical terrain but also the symbolic and affective ground on which lives are built. This paper explores the layered instability of ground – both material and epistemic – through ethnographic research in post-mining communities grappling with the aftermath of decades-long strip mining and contested revitalization. In Czech, the term "zahlazování" (effacement) refers to post-mining reclamation, but also evokes deeper erasures of memory, loss, and entangled human–nonhuman histories.
Through interviews with residents, former miners, and planners, I trace how post-industrial landscapes are experienced as both intimate and alien: filled with memories of childhood play on spoil heaps, yet haunted by pollution, precarity, and displacement. These affective textures coexist with infrastructural decay and geological instability, revealing broader erosions of trust and narrative continuity.
To frame these dynamics, I draw on the figure/ground distinction from Gestalt psychology, which describes how perception relies on shifting relations between what is foregrounded and what fades into the background. In this context, residents emerge as perceptual and political figures against an unstable ground of altered ecologies and unresolved infrastructures. What recedes (dust, noise, industrial ruins) can return through affect or memory. Ground, then, is not a solid foundation but a shifting field that shapes how people perceive history, inhabit change, and imagine possible futures. Rather than seeing post-mining sites as either damaged or restored, I approach them as terrains of perceptual and existential ambiguity.
Paper short abstract
In India’s climate-vulnerable river islands, the cultivation of GMO rice exacerbates ecological and social instability. Women’s unpaid labour sustains cash crops, intensifying gendered violence. Yet women’s collectives create grassroots infrastructures of care, rebuilding ground through solidarity.
Paper long abstract
In the climate-vulnerable river islands of Northeast India, farming communities are experiencing a profound loss of ground - both literal and social. This paper examines how the introduction of genetically modified (GMO) rice has accelerated environmental instability while dismantling traditional forms of social reciprocity. As soils erode, water tables drop, and seasonal floods grow more unpredictable, a parallel unsteadiness takes hold in daily life: women’s agricultural labor, once valued and reciprocated through harvest shares, is now rendered invisible and unpaid.
Focusing on marginalized ethnic minority farming communities in India, the study traces how this double displacement - ecological and economic - intensifies gendered violence and deepens precarity. Yet within these fractures, women are rebuilding ground from below. Through intimate ethnography, we show how local women’s collectives transform from microcredit groups into feminist infrastructures of care, fostering secret savings systems, shared childcare, and cross-class food networks. These practices are not mere survival tactics but vital acts of symbolic and material re-grounding in a landscape where both soil and social trust are eroding.
By holding together the material and social dimensions of “losing ground,” this paper offers a critical lens on how communities navigate entwined crises of ecology and meaning. It argues that in spaces where official systems and stable earth recede, grassroots care practices become essential forms of world-making, offering a fragile but potent terrain for solidarity and repair.
Paper short abstract
The sudden demographic increase of blue crabs forced inhabitants to recognize the new climatic regime in the Venetian Lagoon. The study discusses how Venetians are making sense of their changing territory and experimenting with ways of coexisting with alien species.
Paper long abstract
The Lagoon of Venice is a historic socio-ecological system shaped by centuries of human and non-human interactions. Today, the ecological and climate crisis threatens the survival of traditional practices, such as pesca delle moeche (green crab fishing), while overtourism continues to push residents outside of the Lagoon. In Spring 2023, the alien species blue crab (Callinectes sapidus) became another agent of disruption in the Lagoon, due to its sudden demographic increase, interfering with aquaculture and influencing the sociocultural landscape of the territory.
This study draws from several short ethnographic vignettes of different stakeholders, including politicians, fishermen, shellfish farmers, activists, conservation volunteers, and researchers. We examined how different groups in the Venetian Lagoon make sense of the rapidly changing environment following the blue crab’s arrival. The concept of “block of meaning" in cultural devices is employed to discuss the sense of bewilderment and the emergence of new temporal cycles when familiar landscapes become unrecognizable and meaningless. In addition, we look at how the arrival of the blue crab has increased the polarization between the fishing community, activists, politicians and researchers, revealing the fragility of the Lagoon’s contemporary environmental politics. Lastly, using the concept of embracing volatility to foster resilience, we look at two case studies, Lazzaretti Veneziani and the oasis of Ca’ Roman, in which the local community has come together to care for traditional practices, re-creating a sense of belonging and reconnecting humans with both native and alien species.
Paper short abstract
Ethnographic research on the Oder River demonstrates how ecological crises erode both riverbanks and shared foundations of knowledge, as competing actors mobilise contested visual semiotics to redefine the river as nature, infrastructure, resource, or moral victim.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research on the Oder River conducted during episodes of ecological crises, this paper examines “ground” as a fragile material and semiotic configuration. The destabilisation of riverbanks, floodplains, and river ecologies parallels the erosion of shared grounds of knowledge, trust, and collective interpretation. Diverse social actors, including local residents, anglers, environmental activists, experts, and state institutions, mobilise contrasting visual and narrative frameworks to reframe the river as endangered nature, critical infrastructure, economic asset, or moral victim. These practices do not merely reflect polarised positions but actively generate persistent semiotic instability. Focusing on smartphone videos, drone footage, and their circulation across digital platforms, the paper shows how visual practices intensify experiences of crisis and uncertainty while simultaneously enabling provisional forms of re-grounding through witnessing, affective resonance, and claims to epistemic authority. Rather than re-establishing stability, such practices expose the ongoing labour through which fragile grounds are continuously produced, negotiated, and dismantled.
Paper short abstract
Finnish mire images on social media foreground duckboards and solitude. Yet directing people to these sites accelerates erosion. Interviews and folk poetry show a long tradition in which withdrawal enables deeper connection with forest and mire worlds.
Paper long abstract
Hiking and nature-oriented leisure are increasingly mediated through digital photography and social media, shaping how landscapes are represented and experienced. In Finnish mire-related posts—on Instagram—duckboards frequently dominate the visual frame, functioning as hyperobjects of the mire environment: elements that recur so persistently they define perception (Morton 2013). These images often depict empty duckboards stretching into open spaces, signalling solitude as a central value in nature experiences. Walking interviews with hikers (2023–2024) confirm this: being alone, or with only a few companions, is considered essential for connection with nature.
However, photographing and directing others to these “instagrammable” sites contributes to erosion and ecological disturbance; in some areas, species have vanished due to intensive photographing.
This preference for isolation resonates with older cultural patterns found in Finno-Karelian-Ingrian lyrical folk poetry. These traditional songs lack a unified concept of “nature,” instead contrasting “forest” with “village.” In women’s worry‑poetry, the forest emerges as an asylum—a refuge for those estranged from human society. While often interpreted as metaphors for sorrow or depression, these texts also reveal a deeper logic: distancing from others enables intimacy with the nonhuman world.
Across centuries, from oral poetry to Instagram feeds, Finnish representations of nature share a persistent motif: solitude as a prerequisite for belonging. Whether through duckboards guiding the gaze or verses envisioning the forest as home, these cultural forms articulate a long‑standing mentality that values withdrawal from social ties to achieve closeness with the environment.
The material consists of ethnographic fieldwork, social media posts, and folk poetry.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research in Lithuanian peatlands, this paper examines how conservationists rewet bogs drained during Soviet resource extraction. It shows how care practices reassemble unstable ground, negotiate fractured memories, and rework decolonial ecological futures.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how conservationists in Lithuania engage with landscapes of drained and emptied bogs—former peat excavation sites—new grounds where ecological intervention entangles with unresolved Soviet legacies and imagined environmental futures. Across the Baltic region, peatland rewetting projects have become central to addressing climate change and biodiversity loss. Yet in Lithuania, these projects unfold in landscapes profoundly transformed by Soviet-era industrialisation and agricultural intensification, which produced one of the most heavily drained territories in the world. While the material effects of this transformation are well documented, its cultural and political dimensions remain understudied.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with NGO conservation practitioners and local residents across peatlands in Lithuania, this paper adopts the notion of frontier assemblage to analyse how environmental restoration care practices translate post-Soviet abandonment into decolonial world-making. Intensive drainage and peat extraction once served as tools of Soviet colonial governance, social engineering, and environmental knowledge production; their traces persist in both the landscape and local memory, foregrounding reasons for socio-ecological intervention.
Today, conservationists working to rewet these damaged wetlands navigate inherited legacies that framed peat bogs as unproductive nature to be reclaimed for energy and agricultural use. Their practices reveal how the frontier is continually reassembled through engagements with water, soil, species, and competing historical imaginaries. Through labour of care and multispecies engagement, networks of solidarity and shared imaginaries form. I argue that conservationists operating on landscapes marked by silenced or fractured memories open up possibilities for reconfiguring both ecological futures and the meaning of the peatland itself.
Paper short abstract
This paper considers the fragile grounds of Nairobi’s built environment in light of concerns about precarious buildings, untrustworthy surfaces and popular suspicions of power. It traces how urban underneaths shape above ground modes of knowing, inducing anxieties about the seen and the unseen.
Paper long abstract
This paper considers the fragile grounds of Nairobi’s built environment in light of concerns about precarious buildings, untrustworthy surfaces and popular suspicions of power. Taking Nairobi’s high-rise construction boom and a recent spate of collapsed buildings as its starting point, it examines how longstanding ideas about the hidden and duplicitous workings of politics do not operate in a realm distinct from the material world, but are rooted in its very substance: the materials from which the city is made generate public critique and action.
Drawing on Latour’s (2020) notion of the ‘critical zone’, and his invitation to think across ‘the thin skin of the living earth’, I trace how urban undergrounds are deeply imbricated in above ground modes of knowing. High-rise construction is premised on the extraction of ground to pour foundations, as well as on vast mobilisations of sand, stone, rubble and other materials necessary to building.
Usually, such manipulations of ground remain out of sight to urban residents, but when buildings collapse these underneaths are rendered suddenly visible. Poor quality construction is exposed, along with developers’ prioritisation of profit over safety, prompting public debates about ‘fake’ buildings, corruption and immoral economies. I examine how Nairobi’s frail buildings induce anxieties about the seen and the unseen, and suspicions that the surface promises of the high-rise city conceal a much murkier underneath.