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The paper examines how archaeological soil data, produced through irreversible disturbance within dynamic soil systems, is mobilised as evidence of care in development frameworks, often legitimising transformation rather than placing limits on it.

Paper long abstract

Archaeologically, soil data is often approached as a methodological problem of representation and measurement. This paper instead questions the conditions under which soil data emerges. Archaeologists do not simply observe soils; they intervene in them, generating knowledge through loss and irreversible transformation. Soil data must therefore be understood as knowledge produced at the point where direct engagement with the ground ends.

Archaeological deposits are treated here not as stable residues of past activity, but as provisional configurations within soil systems characterised by ongoing material and energetic flux. Physical, chemical, and biological processes continue to transform trace elements long after measurement has taken place. Soil data therefore captures neither a stable past nor a completed event, but a moment within systems that remain in flux.

This dynamic quality has important ethical consequences. Within development frameworks, soil data is increasingly mobilised as evidence of care: informing design, enabling avoidance, justifying proportional mitigation, and supporting public engagement. While often well intentioned, such practices operate within schemes already committed to transformation and loss. Under these conditions, data-driven care risks functioning as a moral alibi, leaving the scale, necessity, and energetic throughput of development largely unquestioned.

The paper critically examines the diversification of soil data within mitigation practice, arguing that data-driven soil care becomes consequential only when it confronts its own material and temporal conditions of possibility, rather than offering explanation after loss within systems that continue to metabolise change

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This paper argues that what counts as soil data depends on competing temporal regimes. Using the concept of soil clocks, it examines how algorithmic real-time data infrastructures clash with slower ecological rhythms of soil regeneration.

Paper long abstract

What counts as soil data in the Anthropocene may depend less on epistemic standards than on temporal assumptions embedded in data infrastructures. This paper explores how competing temporal regimes shape the production, interpretation, and political relevance of soil data. While agro-algorithmic systems rely on real-time sensing, predictive modelling, and continuous data refresh cycles, soil processes unfold through slower rhythms of decomposition, microbial activity, and regeneration. This temporal mismatch raises a central question: when is soil data considered timely, outdated, or actionable?

Building on STS approaches to infrastructure, classification, and boundary objects, the paper introduces the concept of soil clocks as an analytical device for understanding soil as a time-keeping system rather than merely a measurable resource. Soil clocks describe ecological rhythms through which soils signal conditions of readiness, stress, and recovery, often on seasonal or multi-year scales. By contrast, algorithmic systems operate within accelerated temporal regimes structured by alerts and optimisation cycles. From this perspective, data “shelf life” emerges relationally from the alignment—or misalignment—between algorithmic and ecological temporalities.

The paper develops a conceptual typology of temporal mismatches in soil data, drawing on digital agriculture platforms, policy documents, and monitoring frameworks as illustrative material. It argues that data infrastructures do not simply measure soil but actively re-time it, privileging certain forms of knowledge while marginalising others rooted in embodied practice and care. The paper contributes to STS debates on environmental data pluralism by showing how sustainability depends on synchronising algorithmic systems with ecological rhythms.

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The re-emergence of soil legislation and its elaboration reshaped EU soil governance, as rival scientific coalitions contested what counts as legitimate data: a French-led EJP Soil pedological vision versus the Joint Research Centre’s standardized LUCAS survey model.

Paper long abstract

The European Law on Soil Monitoring and Resilience, adopted in 2025 after the failure of an earlier proposal, marks a significant shift from soil protection to soil monitoring. This transformation raises questions about the role of scientists in defining soil data and shaping what counts as legitimate knowledge for policy. We hypothesize that competing coalitions of experts sought to institutionalize different types of soil data, reflecting distinct approach to soil.

Drawing on the sociology of science and technology and the sociology of public problems, this paper examines how scientific coalitions progressively formed and positioned themselves in relation to the Directive. Methodologically, we combine semi-structured interviews with a netnographic analysis of online interactions among scientific actors, enabling us to trace the reconfiguration of expert networks and their strategies of influence over time.

Our findings show that the shift toward soil monitoring resulted from a struggle between two competing visions of soil data during the drafting process. A pedological approach, was promoted by a French-based coalition structured around the EJP Soil network who emphasized field-based expertise and a pedological vision of soil. A statistical approach was advanced by Joint Research Centre (JRC) through the LUCAS survey, prioritizing standardized, large-scale data production.

We demonstrate how the EJP Soil network progressively consolidated as an epistemic community, learning to translate its protocols into policy-compatible formats. By aligning their data practices with EU governance logics, its members reinforced their influence over the institutionalization of soil monitoring and the definition of legitimate soil data.

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Paper short abstract

How can different soil accounts coexist? If accounting makes realities visible and actionable, soil data—beyond quantification—matters. Drawing on carbon farming in Finland, we show how negotiating responsibilities for climate, soil health, and farm viability can sustain plural soil accounts/data.

Paper long abstract

How can different accounts of soils coexist, complementing and productively challenging one another? This question becomes increasingly relevant when accounting is understood broadly as practices that “make realities visible, intelligible and actionable” (i.e., giving an account), rather than merely as tools for allocating responsibility (i.e., accounting for) (Russell et al. 2017). In this sense, accounting practices shape which natures are conserved, exploited, or left alone. Soil data, understood beyond quantitative representation, becomes central to enabling multiple accounts of soils and, by extension, multiple soil futures.

Our starting assumption is that no particular way of giving an account is inherently responsible for overshadowing others, motivating a search for the coexistence of plural accounts. Empirical studies show that globally abstract, calculative accounts often marginalize place-based and experiential ones (Krzywoszynska 2024, Galina & La Fleur 2023). However, framing these accounts as inherently oppositional risks overlooking what potentially enables the coexistence of different accounts/data, even if only temporarily.

Drawing on Stengers’ (2020) views on abstraction being fundamental to all forms of perceiving/representing, we argue that the key analytical task is to identify the conditions under which attention to multiple manifestations of what is abstracted can be sustained. We explore these conditions through a case study of contested knowledge-making and governance practices around carbon farming in Finland. Here, negotiations over multiple ways of accounting for soils, or allocating responsibilities, in relation to climate mitigation, soil health, and farm viability, emerge as a critical site with a potential for enabling the coexistence of plural soil accounts.

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Drawing on fieldwork with farmers, carbon registries, and verifiers, this paper examines how sensing technologies enact particular ontologies of soil and what is gained by attending to the more intimate sensing practices that these dissipated carbon verification systems struggle to apprehend.

Paper long abstract

Agricultural soil carbon sequestration (ASCS) has emerged as a focal point for climate mitigation investment attracting billions in funding, much of it directed toward novel sensing technologies: satellite remote sensing, AI-driven modeling, distributed mobile apps, and field instrumentation for measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV). Yet as IPCC synthesis reports acknowledge, the socially attainable potential for ASCS is, in fact, much lower than the technically attainable potential (Smith et al. 2007, 500; 2014, 847; Nabuurs et al. 2022, 774). This gap is constituted and mediated by numerous, contextually-specific, and poorly defined social processes (Nabuurs et al. 2022, 774). This paper aims to illuminate some of the critical social processes at play through examining the disjuncture between how carbon is sensed at the level of global stocks and flows amenable to financialization, and how it is known on-farm through the day-to-day enactments of agricultural work. The conceptual challenges structuring ASCS verification—additionality, permanence, leakage—each presume particular ontologies of soil and practice. The sensing regimes emerging around ASCS operate at a distance from the localized and intimate collections of people, plants, animals, and soil that constitute farming as lived practice. Drawing on fieldwork with farmers, carbon registries, and verification organizations, this paper examines how these sensing technologies presume and enact particular relationships and how these presumptions sit uneasily against the ways farmers come to know soil. It asks what is learned by attending to the more intimate and bodily sensing practices that dissipated verification systems struggle to apprehend.

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Soil data in its myriad forms are not points of perception but constitutive of multiple ontologies of soil. Ontological survival turns on the capacity of data to shape agricultural practices, and their ability to endure across different temporalities within networks of care.

Paper long abstract

Increasingly soils are enacted as living systems in need of care. Multiple soil ontologies are performed in labs, operationalised by machinery, researched through participatory projects and experienced through attentive noticing of soil’s liveliness. Soil data in its myriad forms are not points of perception but constitutive of these different ontologies.

We asked 14 farmers what they care for, what they know of the soil and what they want to find out – an invitation to clash ontologies together and see what survives.

Alongside lab tests and models, we walked fields, dug samples and talked about care practice. During codesign, farmers were interested in carbon and fungal-bacterial ratios. In fields farmers described soil in terms of cattle health, “the cow is the soil”, soil moisture as “the bounce” underfoot, and paper mulch making “the field sad.”

The ways we sustain those we care for, and betray others we neglect, give meaning to agents and objects within multi-dimensional networks of care. The temporalities over which the actions and emotions of our relatings play out reveal the resilience of quantitative data when codesigning research and its ephemerality in fields, giving way to immediate obligations experienced through farm work.

Across this boundary, objects within networks change. Cattle and crops switch from units of productivity to mediators of microbial health. Previously invisible agents like earthworms emerge as integral to the system. Ontological survival turns on the capacity of data to shape agricultural practices, and their ability to endure across different temporalities within networks of care.

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This communication examines how the integration of soils into carbon markets reshapes soil carbon data production in soil sciences. It shows how soil carbon commodification fuels a “measurement race” in the academic sector, driving the creation of new standards and frameworks.

Paper long abstract

A recent opinion piece by soil scientists opens with the claim: “Soil carbon is for sale” (Saifuddin et al. 2024), highlighting the recent expansion of voluntary carbon offset markets into agricultural soils. This expansion reframes soil carbon as a tradable climate mitigation asset, yet soil carbon — caught in a dynamic cycle between soils, plants and the atmosphere — resists straightforward transformation into standardized carbon credits. This situation gives rise to numerous efforts in the academic sphere to render soil carbon and its evolutions measurable through the set-up of a monitoring-reporting-verification (MRV) framework to support and guide public and private engagement in carbon markets. This communication examines how the inclusion of soils into carbon markets reshapes soil carbon data production, standardization and mobilization in the scientific sphere. The analysis draws on an empirical investigation into the French and European soil carbon research community, combining over seventy interviews with soil scientists, observations of scientific conferences and research infrastructures, and analysis of grey literature and scientific publications. The commodification of soil carbon generates new demands for soil carbon data, giving rise to a “measurement race” (Valiergue 2020) in the academic sector, but also new constraints, leading to renewed efforts to standardize and harmonize its production. In this process, soil carbon data becomes not only a tool for understanding soil and climate dynamics but also the building block of a carbon market, contributing to STS debates on the shifting relevance of environmental data in the Anthropocene.

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Paper short abstract

Ecopoethics informs us to stay with troubled soil, caring in situ. Techno-legal infrastructure tells us to throw away the toxic “waste”. Lack of access to laboratory data to support the affective information to care for toxic soil, leads to many questions regarding possibility of acting and ethics.

Paper long abstract

Informed by a strong affective and reciprocal bond with soil – 'ecopoethics' after Puig de la Bellacasa (2021) – small in situ Urban Soil Care Architectures have been developed on an urban architecture school campus. Instead of transporting away the top 50 cm of soil to a reception facility and bringing in treated soil on trucks, as is common practice, we want to care for the soil on site. We want to help enliven the compacted soil, invite plants and microbial life into a fairly barren landscape design.

In one spot there is found high levels of toxic hydrocarbon residue. The law says leave it alone and tell the authorities. If you start digging, remove it or seal it. Monitoring the soil toxicity on site by a consultant or sending regular samples to laboratories, is very expensive, and we don’t have the expertise to do chemical analysis. The idea of developing community low tech soil care architectures can thus be said to break down as soon as you find residues that are toxic to humans.

We are making beautiful soil chromatography, communal compost, mycoremediation experiments and sensory workshops, cultivating reciprocal soil love. But to navigate more skilfully in the soil health techno-legal sphere, we need chemical data monitoring over time to carry out appropriate slow, accessible hydrocarbon remediation strategies like mycoremediation.

Is slow, low tech soil care in urban public space still possible, also when there is chemical toxicity? Can we love the oil in the soil?

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Paper short abstract

Landscapes, humans and data centres are all bodies of water. The artwork THIRST/For Knowledge explores the new artificial ocean that flows through the internal material systems of AI data centres worldwide, focussing on a landscape in transition where an AI data centre is being built.

Paper long abstract

Reflecting on the research behind immersive intermedia artwork THIRST/For Knowledge, Kat Austen will explore the multi-sensory artistic methods used to interrogate changing landscapes and their complexation with technologies and industry. With an artistic practice embedded in site-specific research drawing on embodiment and acoustic ecology, Austen will elaborate on methods and mediations for getting to know a landscape and engaging with landscape transformations.

THIRST/For Knowledge is an immersive intermedia exploration of the hidden relationships between landscapes, humans and artificial intelligence. As AI’s demands surge, this artwork asks: what happens when we understand water as a fundamental relation between our bodies and those of the planet and technologies around us?

At the heart of the work are field recordings from Korea’s Solaseado site, where the country’s National AI Data Centre is being built. These disappearing landscape becomes the voice of transformation, carrying the memories of landscapes, human labour, and more-than-human agents. The visitor is immersed in the spatialised sounds of this transformation, as the riverbanks are excavated, levels drained and rerouted.

Combining sound, book publication and film, THIRST/For Knowledge traces the movement of water as a living archive of knowledge, exploitation, and resistance. Alongside site specific field recordings and interviews with local residents at the Solaseado site, THIRST/For Knowledge incorporates audio contributions from artists, scholars, and activists, such as Astrida Neimanis, Dasom Lee, Tu Nube Seca Mi Río, and Samantha Ndiwalana, mixing the details of local transformations with international contexts.

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This performance-based contribution draws on a collaboration between a political theorist (Kurki) and arts practitioner (Whall). It explores dimensions of performative work When Peat Speaks: A Boggy Gassy Bubbly Ensemble and manifold data generated from and interpreted at a Welsh peat bog.

Paper long abstract

This performance-based contribution is a collaboration between an arts practitioner and a political theorist. In previous collaborations, referring to the When Earth Speaks art research project, 2022 -24, we have explored three main inter-related themes at the intersection of art and politics: interpretation and translation of human and non-human meanings through data of various media; data extraction, inaction and the politics of science; and questions around ownership, borders and the modern political order.

This session draws on the next phase of this collaboration. It will evolve through the exploration of a new performance When Peat Speaks: A Boggy Gassy Bubbly Ensemble, 2026. Based on an engagement with a Welsh peat bog, manifold sensor data generated and extracted from it, and engagements with data and the place through multiple media. This session will explore peat data as a metaphor for planetary thinking. Themes explored will include: living/non-living/semiliving; transience/suspension/instability; infrastructures/ architectures/place; inhabitability/sponginess/stillness.

We will develop the content for this presentation based on the development of the performance over 3 days in May 2026, the performance itself, and related further engagements with the bog, peat turves, data, sensors, ‘marking’ architecture (inflatable bubbles) and the artists. The contribution will be communicated as a performance presentation involving live data, film, art, sound and text.

Miranda Whall is an artist working at the intersection of art and science, through expanded drawing, sculpture, film and performance.

Milja Kurki works in the field of politics and international relations and currently works on a project on planetary multispecies politics.