Short Abstract:

Many environmental challenges across the world are geographically entangled, yet often engaged with in isolation. Participants of this roundtable discuss how transnational transdisciplinary historiography might play a role in envisioning plural-yet-connected futures for the case of soy.

Long Abstract:

Many environmental challenges at diverse sites across the world are geographically entangled, yet oftentimes these are studied and addressed within geographically-bounded frameworks. In this roundtable, we focus on entangled histories’ interconnectedness and the plural experiences shaping them, and reflect on ways in which such histories might open up, pluralize and connect societal imaginaries for the future. To do so, we draw on soy as a case study. In places where it is grown (e.g. plantations in Brazil), soy has been associated with issues such as deforestation and child labour. In places where it is consumed (e.g. intensive animal farms in the Netherlands) soy has become associated with a 4-decades long national “nitrogen crisis”, critical animal welfare challenges, pressing public health concerns and more. This roundtable brings together and discusses various approaches with which the different presenters have investigated these multiple connected histories, and engaged with contemporary debates around soy. These approaches include transdisciplinary historiography in collaboration with carefully selected societal actors (i.e. sensitive towards the normativities associated with different actors, and risks of presentism when working with contemporary actors), bringing environmental history in conversation with memory studies, and setting up an interdisciplinary “soy observatory”: a soy research hub that brings historians together with natural scientists and societal actors in Brazil. We explore what kinds of insights these approaches (failed to) yielded with regard to transnational environmental historiography, and how such plural, connected environmental histories may (or not) contribute to contemporary debates on soy.