Short Abstract

This panel examines African soil interventions amid climate, food and biodiversity crises. It invites critical analysis of competing practices of soil knowledge and soil care, the (post)colonial legacies underpinning them, and how they are reshaping more-than-human relations on the continent.

Long Abstract

Concerns about food security, biodiversity, and climate change have made African soils a prominent site of intervention. National policies, international governance agendas, and NGOs frame soil degradation as an urgent concern, translating into initiatives from fertilizer subsidies and land titling reforms to agroforestry campaigns, post-mining restoration, and payment-for-ecosystem-services. While invoking interdependencies between human and other-than-human wellbeing, particularly the importance of (re)establishing nourishing relations with soils, calls to restore and/or protect soils often advance technoscientific conceptions of soil relationality. These interventions reveal persistent tensions between extractive uses of soil, more regenerative approaches, and practices grounded in locally situated knowledges. Soil thus emerges not as a homogenous substance but as a fragmented prism through which to interrogate key concerns that shape African ecologies and politics today.

Building on recent soil-oriented and decolonial scholarship across the social sciences, the panel seeks empirical analyses advancing a careful and critical interrogation of contemporary African soil interventions. Contributors may address ontologies and epistemologies of soil knowledge and care, and historical forms of power shaping more-than-human-soil relations in the present. Possible questions include: What competing scientific and local knowledge claims shape what counts as “healthy” soil in specific contexts? What continuities or ruptures link colonial-era soil management to contemporary soil care programmes? How do soil interventions redistribute power and resources among rural and urban communities, states and non-state institutions? What do these interventions do to variously positioned human and other-than-human actors inhabiting these sites? What generative questions and dynamics emerge in contexts of potential disconnection and friction?

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