Presentation short abstract

For the Pushtimarg (Path of Grace) soil is alive through the divine presence of Krishna. Paying attention to soil's vitality through the nonhuman divine offers new perspectives on soil's cosmological and physical aliveness

Presentation long abstract

For members of the Pushtimarg (Path of Grace) the soil in Braj, India is alive. It is animated by the divine presence of the god Krishna in constant play (lila). This paper suggests that paying attention to divine animacy in soil relations offers the means to explore vitality in soil in new ways, with potentially positive environmental impacts. The human experience of the non-human divine soil is visceral through the senses. Daily, devotees consume soil (charnamrut) before their worship (seva) to purify their bodies and this soil biomorally transforms devotees’ minds. The ways in which the Pushtimarg interact with soil imbues it with new interpretations and meanings that do not connote membership of a nation state or national belonging (Malkki 1992).

Yet, in Braj the landscape is changing with rapid local area's development and increased pollution. Soil as wild and alive is contrasted with the domestication and ‘beautification’ projects that are underway. However, theologically, some devotees see the sacred landscape as self-purifying because of its divine animacy. Others engage in active campaigns to protect the landscape. While soil has largely been underexplored in religious terms apart from national belonging, paying attention to religious and spiritual relations with soil is essential for broadening our perspectives on soil’s cosmological and physical aliveness. These perspectives offer new pathways to generate change in maintaining the ecological balance of this sacred landscape and beyond.

Presentation short abstract

Join the dialogue between German peat bodies & Amazonian muddy agents. More-than-human soil beings resist human control through deforestation, drainage, carbon schemes, constantly moving, eroding, and reassembling. We report first insights from multispecies peace dialogues toward just land futures.

Presentation long abstract

Come in and join the dialogue between German peat bodies and Amazonian muddy agents. Listen to more-than-human beings resisting pre-modern hegemons and their power games of deduction and death (Foucault, 1978:89; Foucault, 1995 [1975]:47ff.).

In the Amazon, soil beings face death through deforestation, cattle-driven pasture expansion, road openings, and mercury- separating gold from their soil-kin. In Lower Saxony, machines once split the hybrid water–soil family in the name of agricultural order—only to attempt, decades later, to reunite them under the banner of “re-naturing.” Today, the modern hegemon seeks to take power over rainforest and moorland by optimizing carbon-sinking capacities, aiming to “control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it” (Foucault, 1978:136).

Yet playful as soils are, they do not submit easily. Entangled across rainforests and moorlands in a shared meshwork (Ingold, 2012), they move, erode, swell, soak, retreat, and reassemble—performing carnevalesque third places (Bhabha, 1994; Werbner & Modood, 2015) of instability: sudden die-offs, mineral flight, soil hardening, and dust or mud as material tactics. While such disturbances are widely noted, far less attention has been given to soils as unruly, resistant beings, or to the quiet, translocal threads connecting Amazonian muddy agents and German peat bodies within global power relations. We report first insights from discourse analysis and translocal multispecies peace dialogues, co-constructed in conversation with soil beings toward multispecies just land futures (cf. Celermajer et al., 2022; Tschakert et al., 2021). In this way, we turn toward futures shaped with, rather than merely upon, soil.

Presentation short abstract

Sharing outputs and reflections from a place-responsive participatory arts inquiry emerging at the estuarial edge of the River Thames in Essex, England, mudlines are richly situated place-songs expressing the indeterminate encounters and intimate intra-actions of this precarious environment.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation shares outputs and reflections from a place-responsive participatory arts inquiry emerging at the estuarial edge of the River Thames in Essex, England. Estuaries are some of the most ecologically and culturally rich landscapes on earth; they are also some of the most threatened. Over 50% of the world’s estuaries have been directly altered by humans and all are at risk from climate change and sea level rise. In response to these times of estuarial erasure, mudlines pays attention to the shrinking edge of the wet-landscape around Canvey Island, surfacing local knowledges, practices, and stories through collaborative sound and intuitive singing.

The Thames Estuary, like many others, is excessively muddy. Vital to estuarine, oceanic and terrestrial ecologies and how they inter-connect, it is also fundamental to the way communities local to estuaries have developed and endure. Yet, neither culturally nor ecologically valued, it is this same mud that legitimises damage and neglect.

Neither wet-nor-land, this is a place of both-and-between where singular, linear space and time dissolve into emergent multiplicity; always-already in composition, albeit often tentatively, inconclusively, evolvingly. Inspired by Neimanis’ concept of ‘weather writing’ where our bodies become “sensitive interfaces with the weatherworld” to help “shift our understanding of human entanglements in climate change phenomena” (2014, 145), mudlines are richly situated place-songs that express the indeterminate encounters and intimate intra-actions that produce this precarious environment and, we hope, support the reshaping of relationships with it.

Presentation short abstract

Sonic Diplomacy explores listening to soil as a collaborative musical practice. Using soil microphones, farmers, gardeners, and land stewards engage with the acoustic life of underground ecosystems, developing embodied knowledge through collective improvisation.

Presentation long abstract

Sonic Diplomacy is an artistic research project that explores sound as a diplomatic space where we can reinvent ways of composing with more-than-human living beings. Drawing on Pauline Oliveros's deep listening and Christopher Small's musicking, we engage with soil as a living, active participant through what Robin Ryan theorizes as "multispecies musicking"—collaborative musical creation positioning soil organisms as co-creators.

Our practice is grounded in listening sessions with local gardeners, farmers, and land stewards. Using soil microphones, we capture sounds of underground inhabitants, revealing acoustic dimensions of soil ecosystems previously inaccessible. The sounds often surprise participants, who are hearing their soil “speak” in this way for the first time. These listening sessions become moments where people begin to improvise with the sounds coming from the soil, opening up a felt, embodied sense of soil health through shared sonic exploration.

This practice shifts us away from the more distant, visual modes of assessing soil conditions and toward a slower, more participatory form of attention. The unpredictability of soil sounds—varying with moisture, temperature, and biological activity—necessitates non-idiomatic musical attention that remains responsive to what each soil community offers.

These encounters demonstrate how artistic and musical methodologies can reactivate our sensitivity to soil's vital dynamics, addressing the "crisis of sensibility" underlying ecological disconnection. By opening ourselves to soil's own acoustic manifestations and treating underground inhabitants as musical partners, sonic diplomacy aims to offer pathways for environmental thinking grounded in direct relational experience through collaborative sound-making.

Presentation short abstract

This contribution theorizes how soil participates in newly emerging metabolic forest politics, in which its role as a reservoir of nutrients and its role as a more or less hospitable environment for forest regrowth become a crucial locus of intervention, care, and experimentation.

Presentation long abstract

As forests are suffering under the compound effects of global warming, the spread of pests and plagues, pollution, and human encroachment, soil has come to the fore as a novel object of concern and care for a variety of publics, ranging from ecologists to forest authorities. Aiming to render forests ‘resilient’ to ongoing and future stressors, soil is increasingly occupying a central role in imaginaries and practices of future-oriented, climate-adapted forestry. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Dutch foresters in the Dutch State Forestry Agency, this contribution attends to these emerging forms of concern and care, and specifically highlights 1) how soil is emerging as a new object of knowledge as foresters engage with the question what good soil may be and seek to know the quality of the soil through expert knowledges and embodied knowledge practices; 2) how soil emerges as an object of care in planning interventions in the forest, specifically when foresters try to introduce ‘soil nursing’ tree species and seek to develop alternative ways of felling to mitigate soil damage. Analyzing these emerging practices in and on forest soil, this contribution theorizes how soil participates in newly emerging metabolic forest politics, in which its role as a reservoir of nutrients and its role as a more or less hospitable environment for forest regrowth become a crucial locus of intervention, care, and experimentation.

Presentation short abstract

In the artistic research project Slibfluisteraars (silt whisperers), artistic researchers engage in sensory, performative, and participative “attempts” of learning to listen to silt. What can intimate attempts at dialogues reveal about the politics and ethics of listening to this material?

Presentation long abstract

In the artistic research project Slibfluisteraars (silt whisperers), artistic researchers engage in sensory, performative, and participative “attempts” (Ex 2024) of learning to listen to silt. The living context for this is the Groninger coast in the Netherlands, where silt is both contested and coveted.

From an anthropocentric, humanistic perspective, silt would not only be considered inaudible – it would not even have anything to say at all. Silt thus tends to be both silenced and backgrounded (Meijer 2025). Yet silt is deeply entangled with ecological, economic, and political dynamics: listening to the material invites us to recognise how it participates in, and responds to, tidal rhythms, dredging practices, industrial histories, and shifting coastal futures in the face of climate change. Yet even opening up to listen does not guarantee understanding. How to listen to something so amorphous and multiplicitous as silt?

Tracing several listening attempts made within Slibfluisteraars, we will explore and experience how listening as an artistic method can open up alternative ways of connecting with silt, while simultaneously attending to gaps and silences that we argue are also often part of multispecies conversation. In doing so, this contribution, which combines artistic and academic approaches, aims to explore collectively what intimate attempts of interpretation and responsiveness can reveal about the politics and ethics of listening to and including non-human voices.

Presentation short abstract

This article explores how mud shapes wild boar hunting atmospheres in Uruguay, showing how its textures and sensations link dispersed moments, bodies, and spaces. It examines how muddy terrains demand physical and sensory effort, connecting hunters, boars, and dogs, field and home.

Presentation long abstract

This article explores how mud operates as a central modulator in the configuration of wild boar hunting atmospheres in Uruguay. While the idea that hunting extends beyond the moment of killing has been recognized, fewer studies have examined how particular substances, textures, and sensations materially connect dispersed moments, bodies, and spaces. Building on this insight, the paper analyzes how muddy terrains—known locally as mugre—demand physical and sensory effort, shaping the bodies and movements of hunters, boars, and dogs. Mud slows, fatigues, stains, and connects: it ties together the field and the home, the hunt and its aftermath. Focusing on mud’s pervasive materiality shows how atmospheric modulation takes shape through its capacity to slow, stain, and connect bodies and environments. Mud becomes the medium through which dispersed temporalities, practices, and relations cohere, giving ethnographic depth to more-than-human life in rural Uruguay.

Presentation short abstract

The presentation analyzes how mud and sandy roads affected mobility, work, and the reach of power in 18th-century Eastern Europe. It shows that seasonal friction shaped social relations and limited Enlightenment modernization projects.

Presentation long abstract

This paper proposes an environmental-historical reading of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe in which mud is treated not as background conditions but as active participants in political and infrastructural processes. Drawing on detailed evidence from road maintenance conflicts, vagrant interrogations, Jewish innkeeping networks, and hydrological regulations in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the paper examines how muddy roads, wetlands, and saturated soils shaped mobility, labor regimes, and the uneven reach of Enlightenment state-building.

Rather than viewing poor roads simply as symptoms of “backwardness,” the paper argues that soil friction itself generated specific social relations: seasonal mud slowed armies and tax collectors, enabled local support networks among peasants and Jewish commoners, and created conditions under which fugitives, smugglers, and itinerant workers could move unpredictably through landscapes considered illegible to the state. Administrators and reformers, in turn, treated mud as a problem demanding intervention—through forced labor, canal digging, drainage, and the removal of “heaps, dams and mills”—revealing a political hydrology in which both human and nonhuman flows had to be disciplined.

The paper traces how soil acted as a limiting infrastructure that contested visions of linear mobility, rationalized space, and modernized labor. In doing so, it shows that the politics of roads in Eastern Europe cannot be understood without attending to the agency of wet ground itself, its seasonal rhythms, and its capacity to both support and undermine projects of reform.

Presentation short abstract

This paper critically explores the “fertiliser addiction” metaphor, showing how nitrogen dependence forms across soils, microbes, animals, plants, and farmers, and explores what a more-than-human recovery might mean when soils and people heal together.

Presentation long abstract

In agricultural discourse, “fertiliser addiction” has been used to describe farmers, soils, and national food systems locked into escalating nitrogen use. Much like invocations of substance abuse disorder, this can be rhetorically powerful but risks moralisation, obscuring socio-ecological and political conditions that make synthetic fertiliser dependence seem unavoidable. This paper takes the metaphor seriously, critically exploring how nitrogen dependences emerge beyond individual failings, as more-than-human relational conditions rooted in soils, plants, microbial communities, agronomic infrastructures, and food-system pressures.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with farmers in southwest England, I rethink “addiction” as a relational condition distributed across human and nonhuman agencies. Long-term nitrogen enrichment reorganizes microbial and plant communities, producing forms of ecological tolerance, withdrawal, and dependency that echo clinical models of addiction. Farmers’ narratives of being “trapped” by fertiliser further illuminate the affective and livelihood dimensions of this entanglement, where shame, guilt, pragmatism, and care coexist with structural constraints.

Attending to soil as an active and responsive substance (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), I propose “fertiliser recovery” as a socio-ecological transition involving attunement, community support, and alternative nutrient practices. Tracing the muddy, co-constituted agencies of nitrogen dependence, this paper opens new ethical and political questions about how soils participate in, resist, and transform the dynamics of industrial agriculture—and what more-than-human forms of recovery might look like. The paper asks what it means to follow the addiction metaphor to completion: to recognise soils as affected kin and to imagine forms of recovery in which humans, soils, and their communities heal together.

Presentation short abstract

An auto-ethnographic essay exploring different ways of knowing soils through personal experiences and discussions between three generations from a family farm in Central Finland. The essay works as an opening for diversifying and “storying” knowledge about agricultural lands in Europe.

Presentation long abstract

In this auto-ethnographic essay, I trace and explore different ways of knowing soils through personal experiences and discussions between three generations (me, my father and my grandparents) who have lived and worked on a family farm in Central Finland. By weaving critical social scientific and multidisciplinary thinking together with personal accounts, the contribution offers an examination of how relationships and knowledge about agricultural soils exist in a variety of ways, many which cannot be reduced to techno-scientific or agro-productivistic understandings. The essay discusses embodied, and silent ways of knowing land, that are thick with time and socially shared, making visible the parallel soil knowledges that exist in a place. The essay is also an opening for thinking how diversifying and “storying” knowledge about agricultural lands can build further understanding about more-than-human relations, slower timescales, and the disappearance of local ways of knowing land.