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Short abstract

As the ecological crisis intensifies, farmers in Spain and the Netherlands define and take on new roles as managers of the environments in which they work. Examining ecologically minded practices and ideas of reciprocity and care for the environment, this talk explores an epistemic shift in farming.

Long abstract

Increasing droughts, desertification, tree dieback, soil depletion and other manifestations of the ecological crisis are destroying numerous habitats of more-than-human communities. Along with them, the foundations of agricultural production for (predominantly) human consumption are also under threat, urging farmers to adapt their practices to the rapid changes of ever more exhausted environments. In countries like Spain and the Netherlands, farmers no longer see themselves solely as livestock breeders or crop growers. Rather, they have defined and taken on new roles as stewards of the environments in which they work, for example, as landscape conservationists, water managers, soil remediators and foresters. These additional assignments reflect a broader and demanding shift towards the (self-)responsibilisation of farmers for protecting and restoring environments. They may also be understood as the manifestation of an epistemic frontier as farmers acquire and even prioritise knowledge and skills that help them to situate their own actions in ecological contexts and assess their impact, prompting varying degrees of contestation from the more conventionally minded agricultural lobby and food industry. Based on ethnographic field research in the two countries, this presentation explores examples of imaginaries and practices that farmers and landscape practitioners employ as they learn about water cycles and soil metabolisms to ensure sustainable production. These ecologically oriented approaches to farming are less an expression of professionalised agriculture than a strong interest in ecological interrelations and roles, manifested in forms of knowing and arts of noticing that work towards the realisation of ideas of co-production and reciprocity.

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Short abstract

This article investigates how Sweden’s legal cattle grazing obligations shape agricultural imaginaries and materialities of human-bovine land use. By contesting this law, stakeholders renegotiate visions of welfarist intensification and definitions of what makes land and animals agricultural.

Long abstract

Sweden’s globally unique ‘right to graze’ law guarantees cattle annual access to pasture, significantly shaping Swedish agricultural imaginaries and materialities as well as multispecies relationships between human and bovine land users. Farmers, livestock vets, and other stakeholders are continuously challenging the notion that grazing is an ideal practice to care for both animals and the land in an agricultural sector facing pressure to increase intensification to stay domestically and internationally competitive. Arguments for bovine welfare benefits of being outdoors or for the efficiency of keeping cattle indoors both aim at organising Swedish cattle farming according to different ideals of what agricultural land is, how it should be used and by whom. At stake are also imaginaries and material realities of Swedish agricultural landscapes being visually used and thus maintained by cattle grazing outdoors, while questioning grazing obligations also open debates on how different stakeholders know (themselves in) Swedish agricultural contexts. By contesting grazing practices, stakeholders question relations between cattle and land, but also the public and its images of Swedish agricultural identity. Using the Swedish ‘right to graze’ as a frontier in intensification, I investigate shifting negotiations of productivity and care in an agricultural sector that is reimagining its vision of welfarist modernisation and of what makes landscapes agricultural. Through ethnographic fieldwork with livestock veterinarians and farmers, I explore how grazing organises agricultural intensification and care in Swedish human and cattle land use practices.

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Short abstract

This research examines how ibis conservation on Sado Island reorganizes rice farming into engineered habitats. It argues that satoyama is not restored but assembled through bioinfrastructures, policies, and metrics, producing new frontiers where agriculture and conservation are made to cohere.

Long abstract

Following the extinction of Japan’s last crested ibis on Sado Island, conservation efforts have unfolded through an opportunistic alignment in which it remains unclear whether the bird is being saved through rice cultivation, or rice is being sustained through the return of the bird. Framed under the ideal of satoyama, an imagined landscape of harmonious coexistence among humans and nonhumans, ibises gifted from China are bred within designed wetlands, while Koshihikari, a once prestigious rice variety weakened by typhoon damage, has been revalued through symbiotic cultivation tied to ibis habitat making. Conservation thus proceeds through a chicken and egg paradox in which species recovery and agricultural revitalization become mutually justificatory. I examine the bioinfrastructures that sustain this paradox. I argue that satoyama on Sado is not a preexisting natureculture awaiting restoration, but a politically fabricated landscape frontier. What appears as ecological revival is the realignment of rice agriculture, species recovery, rural branding, and state subsidies. Paddy fields are reorganized through pesticide restrictions, redesigned water management, monitoring technologies, alongside certification schemes. These interventions do not simply protect a bird; they transform land use, discipline farming practices, and redistribute value across soils, farmers, birds, markets, and state agencies. Satoyama emerges as an effect of infrastructural coordination even as local actors hold divergent understandings of what it is. I also situate satoyama beyond Japan, where it travels less as a cultural inheritance than as a portable assemblage sustained by policy imaginaries that generate new epistemic frontiers.

Keywords: Satoyama, Bioinfrastructure, Japanese Crested Ibis, Conservation

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Short abstract

Peatland restoration is increasingly driven by efforts to "economize" the agenda. Analyzing it as a temporal-material frontier, I examine ethnographically the frictions between slow peat temporalities and short-term financialized logics, and ask what kind of futurization is at stake in this process.

Long abstract

The restoration of European peatlands will radically change European agriculture. As one of the most important instruments for mitigating climate change and securing water supplies, the renaturation of formerly drained and agriculturally used peatlands is the focus of economic and political attention. It is increasingly driven by efforts to "economize" (Çalışkan & Callon 2009) the peatland restoration agenda, for example through voluntary CO₂ credits. These approaches promise win-win solutions for farmers, financial actors, and the climate alike, while fundamentally transforming the economic, cultural, and social management of peatlands.

This paper contributes to the critical analysis of the temporal-material dimension of epistemic frontiers in post-agrarian, financialized "peatscapes" (Palmer et al. 2025). I propose analyzing peatland restoration as a 'temporal-material frontier' to reveal the structural tensions of these financing strategies. Central is the incompatibility between the slow, fragile materialities of peatlands and the short-term horizons of financial actors: peatland regeneration takes decades and requires specific ecological conditions – a timeframe difficult to reconcile with the promise of quick carbon returns. Translating ecological "peat time" (Parry 2025) into financed time logics leads to contradictory resistances and epistemic uncertainties – for example, whether rapid rewetting increases methane emissions in the short term, thereby accelerating rather than delaying climate change. Based on multi-sided ethnographic fieldwork in Scottish and German peatlands, I examine how epistemic and financial controversies are negotiated in financialized rewetting, what "futurization" (Tellmann 2020) is at stake, and which actors, materialities, and temporalities are taken into account.

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Short abstract

This paper explores the frontiers emerging around muskoxen introduced to West Greenland in the 1960s. Tracing the resource logics at play and the changes occurring as the muskoxen were adopted in a caribou landscape, the paper argues that muskoxen undo the imaginaries continuously spun around them.

Long abstract

In the 1960s, when Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland was a Danish county, 27 muskox calves were translocated from Northeast Greenland to West Greenland. This endeavour was planned and carried out by a Danish zoologist with his team and supported by the Danish administration. The motivation was twofold: securing the conservation of a species considered in threat of extinction in its original habitat and establishing a new meat resource for the increasingly sedentary human population in West Greenland. The landscape selected as the new muskox habitat muskoxen was Angujaartorfiup Nunaa, a tundra landscape ideal for the animals due to its stable climate with little precipitation but plenty of vegetation. With a US Air Base in the vicinity, access to monitor the newcomers was easy and hunting by Kalaallit Inuit was limited. Before the muskoxen arrived, the undertaking was contested by Greenlandic hunters and politicians. To them, Angujaartorfiup Nunaa was an ancient caribou hunting ground; they feared that muskoxen would outcompete their treasured caribou.

This paper explores the muskox translocation as a colonial contact zone and an epistemic frontier. It investigates the Danish logics of animal production at play when “cultivating” a new meat resource for the Greenlandic population, and it traces the changes that occurred as the muskoxen were gradually adopted and adapted to the caribou landscape. Analysing the manifold encounters in which the muskox took centre stage, the paper argues that Kalaallit land relations dissolve urban-rural dichotomies and that the muskoxen themselves continue to undo the resource imaginaries spun around them.

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Short abstract

Peasants rapidly adopted the potato in 18th-century Bayreuth to contest tithes. Difficult to classify within existing crop categories, it disrupted fiscal and agricultural orders. This paper examines the imaginaries, the relational entanglements, and the shifting landscape of power it generated.

Long abstract

This proposed paper, drawing on early modern history, seeks to demonstrate that the potato provided peasants with a means to contest the tithe, renegotiate the balance of power surrounding landownership, undermine entrenched privileges, and materially transform agricultural landscapes, generating new imaginaries and complex relational entanglements within rural society.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, court records from the Lutheran principality of Bayreuth attest to the rapid adoption of this tuber by peasants, who regarded it as a valuable ally in evading tithes. Neither a cereal, nor a legume, nor a pulse, the potato resisted existing systems of classification and regulation. As such, it proved difficult to govern within the prevailing fiscal framework, disrupting both established cropping patterns and the corresponding landscape of taxation.

The question of whether the potato should be subject to the tithe became the subject of sustained debate and conflict between peasants and the parsons and princes who collected it. In response to these forms of infrapolitics, a regulatory response gradually emerged. Princes sought to reassert their authority, most notably through the ordinance promulgated by Margrave Frederick III on 2 May 1746, which sought to regulate the tithe on potatoes.

At the same time, scholars associated with the emerging cameralist tradition reappropriated the potato within a broader discourse of agricultural improvement. Framed as part of a wider set of agrarian innovations, the tuber became integrated into debates on the necessity of reforming fiscal and tax systems.

Keywords: potato; political economy; tithe; infrapolitics; moral economy

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Short abstract

This paper examines Norwegian wild reindeer as contested epistemic frontier amid Chronic Wasting Disease. I show how genetic research and biosecurity concerns turn wild reindeer into a new epistemic object subject to virtual 'risk', where mitigative efforts lead to a blurring between wild and tame.

Long abstract

This paper engages Norwegian wild reindeer as an ‘epistemic frontier’ in the context of Chronic Wasting Disease and the planned re-introduction of reindeer into a specific mountain landscape.

In March 2016, the first ever European case of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) was identified a wild reindeer from Nordfjella in Western Norway. This set in motion a wide range of preventative measures, including the preemptive eradication of 2500 wild reindeer in the Nordfjella mountain area in 2017/2018. Because of CWD’s uncanny ability to remain infectious in soil for years on end, Nordfjella was to remain without wild reindeer for five years before a planned reintroduction.

However, due to continuing uncertainties surrounding the persistence of CWD prions in Nordfjella soil, this has not materialised. Together with new genetic research indicating that semi-domesticated reindeer are more resistant to CWD than wild reindeer, the planned reintroduction has become a contentious site of competing scientific reasoning and divergent enactments of wild reindeer through different epistemic regimes.

While some experts argue for “building a new wild herd” using semi-domesticated reindeer because of their "genetic resilience", others stress the importance of “retaining original genetics”. For those involved, vexing questions concern what should matter more; future security or past genetics, and whether one can 'build' a wild herd using semi-domesticated reindeer. Turning to the blurred history of wild and semi-domesticated reindeer in the area, I contextualise the current discussions in relation to past histories of mountain transhumance and the shifting uses outfields.

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Short abstract

Most tree restoration programs in Rwanda happen on private land, producing a rural frontier in the form of a struggle to increase tree density on farmland. This frontier is shaped by remote sensing progress, that made individual trees into policy objects, and by the promotion of native tree species.

Long abstract

Rwanda has been committing to ambitious forest restoration targets since 2011, as part as global initiatives such as the Bonn Challenge. In the most densely populated country of continental Africa, where about 70% of the population lives from agriculture, land shortage makes it difficult to find where to plant trees. The promotion of agroforestry is thus a large part of Rwanda’s strategy to increase tree cover: most tree restoration programs happen on private farmland. This contribution explores the production of a rural frontier of tree restoration, through the analysis of the scientific and expert knowledge that steers, supports and monitors tree restoration programs in Rwanda.

First, I will show how progress in remote sensing has contributed to turn individual trees (as opposed to forested areas) into policy objects (e.g., by including them in carbon inventories). The rural frontier, in this case, does not take the form a moving front but of a struggle for increasing tree density by conquering nooks and crannies of small plots of farmland. Second, I will analyse public institutions’ efforts to promote native tree species instead of popular fast-growing, exotic species (such as eucalyptus) as an epistemic frontier. Whereas farmers are constrained by the authorities in the choice of the agricultural crops they grow, most experts involved in tree planting projects highlight the importance of farmers’ engagement for the success of tree planting campaigns: farmers might plant a seedling and uproot it the next day if they are not convinced of its usefulness.

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Short abstract

Hamburg’s flowering meadows show how urban lawns become experimental sites for biodiversity. Through maintenance practices, seed sourcing, and novel mowing techniques, practitioners co-produce new ecological regimes, making green spaces contested sites of knowledge production.

Long abstract

Across many European cities, municipal lawns are being transformed into flowering meadows in response to biodiversity concerns. In Hamburg, initiatives such as Natürlich Hamburg! promote ecological mowing regimes and reseeding with plant mixtures designed to support insects and other species. While often framed as straightforward ecological improvements, the practices through which these meadows are assembled reveal more complex relations.

This contribution traces the emergence of 'ecological' mowing through a multi-sited ethnography of maintenance practices, conservation initiatives, and supporting technoscientific infrastructures. Practitioners experiment with low-impact mowing technologies adapted from alpine agriculture and develop novel material and metabolic relations to counter high fertilizer loads, which threaten many pre-industrial species assemblages. Urban meadows are de-fertilized by biomass removal and by opening new material pathways that allow these assemblages to persist.

These initiatives are not simple transfers of rural conservation practices into cities. Rather, they emerge through a differentiated community of conservationists, ecologists, landscape architects, municipal crews, and administrators co-designing new maintenance regimes. As they negotiate ecological goals, technical constraints, and public expectations, urban lawns become sites where the meadow is enacted as a contested epistemic object—for example, through regularly mown 'acceptance strips' that frame taller vegetation and signal intentional care.

This empirical study demonstrates how urban green spaces function as epistemic frontiers, where agricultural conservation models, urban infrastructures, and ecological processes are experimentally recombined to produce novel urban ecologies.

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Short abstract

Contrasting two research projects on peatland restoration and agricultural intensification, this talk discusses the differing ways the grounds of former agricultural resource frontiers are encountered in present and future Norway.

Long abstract

This talk will focus on the ways the creation, intensification and restoration of agricultural fields and forestry plots has been a resource frontier for the Norwegian state. Throughout the twentieth century, “uncultivated” ground throughout rural Norway became a frontier for the expansion of agriculture and forestry. Under the guise of freeing up resources for extraction and creating social welfare, vast areas of grasslands, scrublands, wetlands, and swamp forests were drained, plowed, planted and fertilized. While the creation of new farm and forestry land continued well into the 1980s, some drained and replanted landscapes were already being abandoned in the 1950s. By the end of the twentieth century, these landscapes had transformed in two ways: vast swathes of land were abandoned, while elsewhere the remaining farms expanded and land was farmed more intensively.

In the remains of this past frontier, people across Norway approach its aftermath with widely diverging strategies. By combining each of our research on peatland restoration and agricultural intensification respectively, we will show how the 20th century resource frontier of agricultural expansion has been turned on its head by new land use regimes. Through these cases we show that value follows a binary management of either full intensification of fields or the full restoration of these landscapes.

By bringing these cases together, we explore how farmers and government bureaucrats encounter the landscapes of past rural frontiers in diverging ways, but also how these different approaches converge in the creation of new frontiers of knowledge and futuremaking projects.

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Short abstract

The Sardinian Blue Zone reframes a marginal agro-pastoral landscape as a global model of longevity. This paper examines how scientific translation reshapes rural land imaginaries, turning backwardness into value while sustaining epistemic hierarchies.

Long abstract

This paper examines the Sardinian Blue Zone as an epistemic rural frontier emerging from a historically marginal agro-pastoral landscape. First identified in the mountainous region of Ogliastra, the Blue Zone has become a global model of longevity, transforming a territory long depicted as isolated and underdeveloped into a paradigmatic site of health and resilience.

Drawing on Science and Technology Studies and postcolonial scholarship, the paper traces the sociotechnical translation processes through which individual biographies were converted into demographic indices and subsequently into genetic and epigenetic explanations. These operations reframe rural practices — pastoralism, subsistence agriculture, seasonal foodways — as measurable lifestyle determinants while simultaneously homogenizing complex ecological and social realities.

The Blue Zone thus operates as a frontier where agricultural imaginaries shift: marginality becomes value, low-intensity land use becomes sustainable virtue, and rural “backwardness” becomes biological advantage. Yet this revalorization remains ambivalent. The scientific construction of longevity reproduces subtle colonial logics of extraction and validation, reinforcing Sardinia’s position as an epistemic periphery dependent on external authority.

At the same time, local actors strategically reappropriate the Blue Zone identity through tourism, heritage performances, and symbolic boundary-making, turning stigma into resource.

The Sardinian case reveals how rural frontiers are not only sites of ecological or economic transition, but also arenas where knowledge, identity, and power are renegotiated.

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Short abstract

This paper draws on an ethnography of England’s southern coast to explore how rural futures are aesthetically negotiated. The rural coast is a frontier to live, to grow food, to accommodate climate change, but also to contest national imaginaries.

Long abstract

This paper looks at restoration, future land use, and the rural coastal idyll.

Many places around the English coast are caught between different visions of future resilience. They are often sites graded as the highest-quality agricultural land, important for food security; often too they result from historic drainage, improvement projects, and enclosure of wet commons. Rural coastal areas are under increasing housing pressure from a growing population and chronic housing shortage, with many agricultural areas being proposed as development sites.

But the rural coast is also vulnerable to sea level rise, and decisions are being made about areas to defend or let the sea breach, through managed realignment and coastal retreat. Such options are proposed through the lens of nature restoration and repair, with re-wetted areas supporting vulnerable species and contributing to national restoration targets. Land is turned back from agriculture to a new wet commons, which can support resilient futures elsewhere by accommodating flooding or sequestering carbon.

Drawing from an ethnography of England’s southern coast, I explore how contestation of the rural coast is both epistemic and aesthetic. Claims depend on the kinds of rurality that are made visible; particularly in a context where images of the rural idyll continue to drive migration to the coast and structure expectations of the future. The rural coast is a frontier to live, to grow food, and to accommodate climate change; it is also a frontier negotiated around how rural life should look, between national imaginaries and resilience in place.

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Short abstract

In China’s tobacco regions, soil degradation, fragmented land, and planting contracts make terrain a shifting frontier. Company deploys soil science, mechanization, and digital mapping to govern fields, yet the dynamics of soils, humans, plants, and devices continuously unsettle control.

Long abstract

In China’s tobacco-producing regions, recurring tensions around soil quality, fragmented landholdings, and area-based planting contracts render terrain a critical site of intervention. These dynamics reflect broader land use transformations beyond Europe, where agricultural landscapes are continually restructured through intensification, mechanization, and negotiated abandonment. I argue that these tensions crystallize around tobacco terrain as a shifting operational frontier where knowledge, technique, technology, and governmentality intersect. This frontier produces new and contested relations among humans, soils, plants, and infrastructures. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Nanxiong, northern Guangdong, this paper examines how tobacco companies mobilize soil science, mechanization, and digital mapping systems to reorganize rural space and agrarian livelihoods. It also explores how various actors, including matter and living beings, participate in and respond to these transformations in diverse ways. In promoting farmyard manure, companies attempt to reclaim soil as a living system, drawing on the epistemic authority of soil science to legitimize organic cultivation practices. Meanwhile, technological interventions—mechanization and digital mapping systems—seek to standardize and govern tobacco fields. Yet these efforts are continually unsettled: commercialized organic inputs have disrupted soils’ self-nurturing cycles, farmers maintain traditional planting habits and spatial strategies, and bureaucratic and infrastructural constraints complicate governance. This paper shows that tobacco companies seek to impose a particular ontology of tobacco terrain through scientific discourse and technological interventions, yet these efforts are continuously unsettled by the materiality of things themselves. The inherent heterogeneity and openness of tobacco terrain inevitably allow vitality, decay, and relationality to continually exceed the boundaries of governance